We are pleased to announce the release of OMF version 5.4!

This release has many changes under the hood, but only few changes to the OEDL syntax.

Among the things that have been added or fixed are:

• Communication between AM and EC now happens over XMPP. For compatibility reasons the AM still provides a HTTP interface for all services.
• "omf stat" and "omf tell" are working with the latest CMC service
• support for "ath9k" Wifi driver and Intel WiMAX cards
• the RC can now download files from FTP servers
• when loading a disk image, it can be grown to the actual disk size and shrunk before saving it. This allows the users to make use of the full HDD space as well as provides compatibility for testbeds with mixed disk sizes.
• the "all" topology is available again
• improved the status report after disk imaging
• the EC can now "give up" on nodes that don't sign in for any experiment

For a complete list of new features and bug-fixes, read the OMF 5.4 roadmap page.

For installation instructions please see our comprehensive Installation Guide for 5.4.

Experimenters can browse our detailed User Guide Documentation for information on how to use OMF. While most of the OMF 5.4 instructions and commands are similar to the OMF 5.3 ones, there may be some usage discrepancy that we failed to document. If you run into one, please let us know via our OMF user mailing list.

Note: You can run the OMF 5.4 EC and RC alongside older versions of OMF. However we currently do not recommend running the OMF 5.4 and 5.3 AMs on the same XMPP server, since they both try to answer to service calls which may lead to some problems.

The 2012 Tridentcom conference will be hosted in Thessaloniki, Greece, and will serve as a forum where researchers, vendors, providers and users will exchange ideas on past experience, requirements, needs and visions for establishing the research experimental infrastructures of the Future Internet.

Prospective authors are invited to submit high quality research papers before the deadline of Jan 5th 2012.

More information at: http://www.tridentcom.org/2012/call-for-papers

During the last week we have upgraded the NORBIT testbed. The following changes have been made:

• replaced single 802.11abg wireless card with two 802.11abgn cards (Atheros Communications Inc. AR922X, atk9k driver)
• added two antennas for a total of four per node
• upgraded the memory from 512MB to 1GB on several nodes
• added nodes 18-21 to the main testbed (formerly sandbox 1)
• installed Chassis Manager cards that provide remote power on/power off/reset capability and serial port passthrough

Soon all 38 testbed nodes will be available to all experimenters. Please follow the instructions at OMFatNICTA to find out how you can access the NORBIT testbed.

Release date: 2011-05-03

Today we are announcing the release of OMF 5.3.1. This is mainly a bugfix release and is recommended for all OMF 5.3 users.

Among the things that have been added or fixed are:

• reduced debug output
• fixed bug where RC's would not sign in to new experiments
• fixed multiple AM XMPP race condition
• properly killing subprocesses on AM shutdown
• fixed problem with hanging EC after CTRL-C was pressed

Please see the commit log the 5.3 branch of our git repository under the "Repository" tab for a full changelog.

Ubuntu users can simply run "sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade" to retrieve the 5.3.1 update.

Openfire 3.7 stable has just been released. We've been using Openfire 3.6.4 in OMF 5.2 and switched to ejabberd in 5.3 because the older Openfire did not properly support server2server connectivity due to some bugs with self-signed certificates. S2S is working in ejabberd, but we've revealed other bugs in that XMPP server:

• occasionally, ejabberd denies users from publishing to a node, even though the node has been created with open permissions
• ejabberd's database keeps on growing as deleted pubsub nodes and users are not properly wiped from the DB
• ejabberd may produce "zombie messages" - messages from past experiments that are delivered to newly created pubsub nodes

After testing the Openfire 3.7 beta, we found that S2S is now working and some other bugs were resolved as well. Therefore we encourage all OMF testbed administrators to switch to Openfire 3.7 stable, which was released today. The OMF 5.3 install guide [1] has been updated with the installation instructions.

If you are switching from ejabberd to Openfire, make sure you recreate all the necessary pubsub nodes as described in the installation guide.

[1] http://mytestbed.net/projects/omf/wiki/Installation_Guide_53#Installing-Openfire

The OMF SVN repository has been retired in favour of git. Please see the Repository page for details.

We are proud to announce the release of OMF version 5.3!

This release includes many new features, such as a new event driven mechanism, support for disconnected experiments, support for experiments on PlanetLab, etc... Also we fixed many bugs, which are described in our ticket-tracking system. And finally, we did some major code refactoring, which facilitate future OMF extensions and support for federation and virtualisation (e.g. all OMF communications are now using the Publish/Subscribe scheme, new naming scheme for resources, etc...).

The full list of changes in 5.3 is available on our 5.3 Changelog page.

OMF 5.3 includes the following software:

• OMF Experiment Controller 5.3
• OMF Aggregate Manager 5.3
• OMF Resource Controller 5.3
• PXE image build system with latest busybox and kernel 2.6.34
• preconfigured Ubuntu 10.4 baseline image for PC-based resources (kernel 2.6.32)

Packages for Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid x86/amd64 and Fedora Core are available in our repository. For installation instructions please see our comprehensive Installation Guide for 5.3.

The source code for this release can be accessed from our Repository.

OMF users can browse our detailed User Guide Documentation for information on how to use OMF, or read or FAQs, or post questions to the OMF user mailing list.

Important note: While OMF 5.3 is now released, most of the user and installation documentation on our wiki are still describing OMF 5.2. We are currently focusing exclusively on updating all these documents to describe OMF 5.3. The updated set of OMF 5.3 documentation will be available incrementally over the next 2 weeks.

Today we are releasing our latest and greatest version 5.2 of OMF. More than 50 bugs have been fixed and many new features were implemented since our last release. All communication between the experiment controller and the resource controllers now takes place using XMPP, which is a major step towards federation of OMF. For a full list of changes please see Changelog_52.

OMF 5.2 includes the following software:

• OMF Experiment Controller 5.2
• OMF Aggregate Manager 5.2
• OMF Resource Controller 5.2
• PXE image build system with latest busybox and kernel 2.6.32
• preconfigured Ubuntu 9.10 baseline image for the nodes

Packages for Ubuntu 9.10 x86/amd64 are available in our repository. For installation instructions please see our extensive Installation_Guide_52.

The source code for this release can be accessed from our Repository.

For OMF support please consult FAQ_and_Support and make sure you have a look at our detailed Documentation.

Two new mailing lists for OMF and OML users have been created:

https://lists.nicta.com.au/wws/subscribe/omf-user
https://lists.nicta.com.au/wws/subscribe/oml-user

Please subscribe and post your questions on these lists, and the developers will assist you. The subscription site also provides an archive for users to check if their questions have previously been answered.

Or simply email your question to omf-user@lists.nicta.com.au or oml-user@lists.nicta.com.au respectively.

We are excited to announce the release of OMF 1.2

This release includes the following software:

- Node Handler v4.4
- Node Agent v4.4
- Grid Services v2.2

It is available in our Ubuntu/Debian repository. Just append the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list :

deb http://pkg.mytestbed.net/ubuntu hardy/

and run the command apt-get update.

You should now be able to install the packages nodehandler4, nodeagent4 and gridservices2 using the command apt-get install.

Alternatively, you can also directly download the Ubuntu packages here:

http://pkg.mytestbed.net/ubuntu/hardy/

Some interim installation document are available here. We are still working on these documents, so please do not hesitate to contact us if something is not clear, missing, or misleading there. You may also want to review the Glossary of OMF's entities.