Elephant: The File System that Never Forgets
HOTOS '99 Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
zFS " A Scalable Distributed File System Using Object Disks
MSS '03 Proceedings of the 20 th IEEE/11 th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSS'03)
Cyber defense technology networking and evaluation
Communications of the ACM - Homeland security
An integrated experimental environment for distributed systems and networks
OSDI '02 Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementationCopyright restrictions prevent ACM from being able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading
Ext3cow: a time-shifting file system for regulatory compliance
ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS)
File system design for an NFS file server appliance
WTEC'94 Proceedings of the USENIX Winter 1994 Technical Conference on USENIX Winter 1994 Technical Conference
Soft updates: a technique for eliminating most synchronous writes in the fast filesystem
ATEC '99 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Transparent checkpoints of closed distributed systems in Emulab
Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems
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Many network testbeds today allow users to create their own disk images as a way of saving experimental state between allocations. We examine the effect of this practice on testbed operations. We find that disk imaging is very popular among both research and class users. Excessive disk image creation makes OS upgrades and patches time-demanding, leading over time to experiments that use old and vulnerable images. Since older images are not supported on new testbed hardware this hurts users by reducing their chance of successful resource allocation. Finally, disk images are usually large requiring excessive storage space on testbeds. We then propose and evaluate three alternatives to disk imaging. We find that each approach significantly reduces storage requirements, and produces a list of OS image customizations that may help testbed users upgrade their images to newer OS versions. While this would still be a very manual process, we believe our results show promise and identify need for further research in this area.