Jacks: State of "Publicly routable IP" checkbox doesn't reflect eventual reality
Consider the Emulab portal, and a user who creates a profile using Jacks.
He or she asks for a "raw-pc" of type "d710".
Jacks shows that the "Publicly Routable IP" checkbox is not set.
What is the user expected to infer from this?
It seems reasonable that the user would infer that the d710 would not have a publicly routable IP address when the profile is instantiated on the Emulab testbed. But this is not what happens, of course, since it gets a control-net interface.
It is unclear to me how this is supposed to be resolved in general, since I guess that there are testbeds that don't give out routable control-net addresses to physical nodes (is that right?), and as far as I know, except for firewalled experiments, Emulab always gives routable control-net addresses to physical nodes (is that right?). So whether or not a particular node has a routable control interface seems to depend on the instantiation.
Or, looking at it another way, a single checkbox cannot convey all the possibilities ("must not have one," "may not have one," "may have one", "must have one"). The meaning of the checkbox is therefore unclear to users (to me, at least).