I'm Claudiu, a second year PhD student in CS at Sapienza University (Rome, Italy) and I would like to work on your GSOC idea to build a VB-based simulator for OONI. My main research topics are network neutrality and broadband measurement and I'm currently working on a project on traffic shaping detection. [...]

Hi, You've seen NetKit-based TorLab, right? http://minerva.netgroup.uniroma2.it/discreet/browser/torlab/trunk/INSTALL http://list.dia.uniroma3.it/pipermail/netkit.users/2007-November/000313.html Outdated, but perhaps similar to what you're talking about doing? Besides TorLab, there's also a Java-based simulator, which is somewhat similar. Sorry, I always forget the name of it. Why VB? And do you mean VB or VB.NET? At least the latter might work on Linux via Mono. Anyway, VB seems rather a strange language choice for this community, which seems to prefer Python (Stems) or Java (JTorCtl) for this sort of thing.

On May 1, 2013, at 1:59 AM, Claudiu Perta <claudiu.perta@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Tor team,

Greetings Claudiu!

I'm Claudiu, a second year PhD student in CS at Sapienza University (Rome, Italy) and I would like to work on your GSOC idea to build a VB-based simulator for OONI. My main research topics are network neutrality and broadband measurement and I'm currently working on a project on traffic shaping detection. I also partecipated to last year GSOC when I developed in Python a server selection mechanism for M-Lab (https://code.google.com/p/m-lab/source/browse/?repo=ns).

This is very relevant to the OONI areas of research.

I've worked in the past with Netkit (http://wiki.netkit.org/index.php/Main_Page) and I think it meets all the requirements of this GSOC project. Netkit is an open source project,based on user-mode linux[1], a linux kernel that can be executed as a user process on a standard linux box. In particular, each virtual machine in Netkit can be configured to play the role of a regular host, of a router, or even of a switch. For this project, each test could be set up as a ‘netkit lab’, which is a set of preconfigured virtual machines that can be started and halted together. For example, one virtual machine running ooniprobe could be connected to the external world through a second virtual machine that implements various censorship policies, specific to each test.

Netkit does seem like a good choice for doing this. Making this work on the basis of Netkit would probably be a matter of writing a set of NetML descriptions for the various censorships we are interested in simulating. BTW I am currently in Rome and would be up for meeting up someday to perhaps discuss this in person further or hack on it together. ~ Art.