Wide-area Tutorial

Wide-area nodes are used in a somewhat different manner than local nodes. Wide-area nodes are shared amongst experimentors and projects, and while you have exclusive use of your local nodes, you are most likely sharing your wide-area nodes with others. For that reason, there are a number of features that are not available on wide-area nodes. Note: many of these restrictions will be lifted when we switch to Unix virtual machines on wide-are nodes (eg: jail on Freebsd and vservers on Linux). PlanetLab nodes have a slightly different set of features and restrictions. These differences are noted where appropriate. On the other hand, many testbed features are available on wide-area nodes: