Smart Servers as Watchdogs for Trouble on the Web

A consortium of university and industrial scientists has created a network designed to test a new generation of tools that may one day lead to a smarter, more secure Internet that can spot network problems like traffic jams and worms long before they affect individual computers. In operation for about a year and growing rapidly, the consortium, called PlanetLab, has so far set up about 220 PC's around the world, at sites including Princeton and the University of California at Berkeley in the United States and Singapore and Frankfurt overseas, for its test bed network. Many individual researchers have signed up not only to test their innovations, but also to take advantage of the increasing range of network services; they are contributing nodes at their sites as the price of entry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/technology/circuits/23next.html
http://www.planet-lab.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/planetlab/

Software at each node gives any member access to the network and its services. Brent Chun, a scientist at Intel Research Laboratory in Berkeley, has been testing a program, Netbait, that was designed to spot potential worms. "If you have the ability to run not on a server, but at many points, then you can exploit the multiple vantage points of the network," he said. After he deployed Netbait at about 90 PlanetLab nodes, the nodes provided surprising information, revealing, for example, a new variant on the Internet worm Code Red.

Posted by Tom on October 23, 2003