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Emulab FAQ: PlanetLab: Using PlanetLab nodes with a specific version in your experiment.

Emulab FAQ: PlanetLab: Using PlanetLab nodes with a specific version in your experiment.

At certain times, you may want to use only PlanetLab nodes running a specific version of the PlanetLab software. For instance, as PlanetLab migrates to version 4.0, there are some "Production" nodes running 3.x-era software, and other "Rollout" nodes running the latest software that will eventually be rolled out to all nodes.

Selecting nodes of a specific version is easy. To request a PlanetLab node running current "Rollout" software, add a line similar to the following to your NS file:

$myplabnode add-desire plabstatus-Rollout 1.0

By default, if you do not set a desire for your PlanetLab nodes in your NS file, you will receive only "Production" nodes, unless you have requested more PlanetLab nodes than there are "Production" nodes (the remainder nodes in your experiment will receive any other available PlanetLab nodes).

We obtain feature names like "plabstatus-Rollout" from PlanetLab's sites.xml file; each node entry contains a "STATUS" field, which we append to "plabstatus-" to form the node feature name. Therefore, if you want to select nodes with a different status, i.e. "Alpha", just add a desire for the feature name "plabstatus-Alpha" with a weight of 1.0, as shown in the example above.