wiki:GENIEducation/Resources

Version 3 (modified by nriga@bbn.com, 11 years ago) (diff)

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Planning a Class or an Event on GENI

If you would like to use GENI in your classroom, or do a one-time tutorial there are a few things that you need to do. Based on our experience we came up with the following timeline of when things should happen in order for your class/event to go smoothly. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions.

Early, at least two weeks in advance

Depending on your class/event you want to start the process as early as possible especially if this would be your first use of GENI.

  1. [Optional] emaill [maito:help@geni.net] to let us know you will be using GENI. This will let us help you along the process. We strongly recommend this, if this is your first time using GENI
  2. Access to GENI Portal If you are planning to use the [httpsportal.geni.net GENI Portal] in your class you should figure out how you and your students will get access to GENI. Read the SignMeUp page for more details.
  3. Create a Project' for your event. Although you might already have a project we recommend that you use a separate project for your class/tutorial. This will make the account management easier. We also strongly recommend to add an expiration date for your project. The expiration date should not be right after your event in case the students want to experiment for a bit after, but it should be close. We suggest to use 1 week after your event.
  4. Add any other instructors or teaching assistants to the project as Admins. This will allow them to help with the management of the project and with debugging problems with the students.
  5. If you haven't already, you and any other instructors or teaching assistants should read through the slides (including the notes) and work through the exercise and let us know if you have any questions.
  6. Choose exercises and test them We maintain a list of tutorials/assignments that you can use out-of-the-box. If you decide to use your own exercises we suggest you start at least a month before the date you are planning to use these new assignments.
  7. Decide what machines the student should use. Depending on the exercises and the event

Approximately one week in advance

  1. Invite attendees to login to the portal and request an account from the GENI IdP if necessary. This may require some manual intervention, so it's important that people do this early.
  2. e-mail attendees information about any other pre-work. In particular, they will need a machine that allows them to ssh using a private key and has omni installed.
  3. Make a worksheet for each attendee
  4. If desired, print hardcopies of the exercise and worksheets.

Day of exercise

  1. A few hours before hand, bulk add attendees to the project (doing this in advance makes the exercise go more quickly)
  2. At the exercise, add any stragglers who haven't joined the project by having them clicking the "Request to Join a Project" button on the home page. Then you are one of the project Admins should manually add each of these users to the project.
  3. At the exercise, please distribute:
    1. one worksheet to each attendee (or pair of attendees) doing this exercise. The worksheet does three things:
      1. it helps attendees identify the data (and not the control plane interface) which they will bring down during the exercise
      2. it ensures slice names are unique
    2. a hardcopy of the instructions
    3. Use the slides to cover the background material needed to do the exercise

Account Management

Debug problems

Setup your GENI project

In order for you and your students to get access to GENI resources you will need to get GENI accounts. Every GENI experimenter has to be associated with at least one GENI project, so you will have to create one. Currently there are two different ways to get a GENI project. No matter what way you chose to create your project, it is best to create a separate project for each event. For example if you are planning to use GENI for a course make a new project only for that.

  1. Using the GENI portal: Since 2012, GPO has been developing a new ClearingHouse, that presents a unified view of GENI to experimenters and integrates access with various research institutions. The portal is open for use, but keep in mind that it is still under development. To setup your project this way see these instructions
  2. Use pgeni.gpolab.bbn.com: This is an emulab instance that is run by GPO and issues credentials that give you access to all federated GENI resources. This is the main method that we have used so far, so many tutorials and assignments assume these type of accounts. To setup your project this way see these instructions

If you are not sure which method to choose, please send us an email.

Setup access for attendees

Depending on how much control you have over who is attending your GENI event you have two options about how to give access to GENI to the participants:

  1. Personal GENI accounts. If you have control, or you know in advance, who is going to need access to GENI, then you should ask them to join your project and get individual GENI accounts. This approach works best for classes, or in tutorials that pre-registration is required.
  2. Temporary Tutorial accounts. If your event is a one time tutorial, and access to GENI is needed only for the duration of the event then you could ask us to create for you a set of temporary accounts as part of your project. In your email please include:
    1. the name of your project and whether it is a project at pgeni.gpolab.bbn.com or at the GENI portal
    2. the number of temporary accounts you will need
    3. the prefix for your accounts, all accounts will be of the form <prefix>uxx, the prefix should be at most 7 characters long and should be indicative of your event. For example if you are doing a tutorial at SIGCOM 2013, then the prefix can be sig13
    4. the email address that you want us to use as alias for the account email addresses. Each GENI account is associated with an email address so that experimenters can be notified about their GENI resources, in the case of temporary accounts, we associate the email address to an actual email address, in that way you can be notified abou the activity of these accounts.
    5. the date, time and duration of your event

NOTE:For one-time tutorials we suggest a combination of the two above approaches, i.e. you should try to have your attendees get personal accounts before your event, but also have a set of temporary accounts for people that show up at the last moment, or have not done the pre-work before your event.

Presentation material

Over the years we have generated a lot of presentation material that you can reuse, there is no point in starting from scratch.

Intro to GENI talk

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