-
- TERMS AND CONDITIONS
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- for OneLab Basic level service
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- Version 0.6 of 20 May 2014
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1 Context
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1.1 OneLab
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- OneLab is an experimental facility for testing new ideas and new technologies in the area of computer networking. It consists of a variety of types of
- platforms, including:
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- internet overlay testbeds
- , testbeds that offer virtual machines distributed across locations in different countries, allowing users to deploy overlays on the internet;
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- wireless testbeds
- , testbeds that consist of clusters of computers that are within Wi-Fi communication range of each other, either in an office environment or in an
- isolated setting;
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- internet of things testbeds
- , testbeds that consist of embedded computing nodes with sensor capabilities, communicating wirelessly in an isolated environment;
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- emulation testbeds,
- computing clusters that offer virtual machines on servers that are interconnected by a high speed switch, enabling large scale network emulation.
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- This list of types of platforms is subject to change, and the current list, along with the identities of the specific platforms of each type, can be found
- on the OneLab website (onelab.eu).
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- Each platform has its own owners, and OneLab is the grouping of these platforms through a consortium of institutions. The OneLab consortium is coordinated
- by UPMC Sorbonne Universités. It operates on a not-for-profit basis.
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- Access to OneLab may also provide access to additional platforms that are not part of OneLab, due to a federation agreement between OneLab and the owners
- of those platforms.
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1.2 Fee-free Basic level service
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These terms and conditions define and apply to OneLab's Basic level service, which is available free of charge.
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- Users who would like additional services are encouraged to contact support@onelab.eu. Some additional services require a written agreement, but are
- otherwise free. Others require the payment of fees or in-kind contributions. (An example of an in-kind contribution is the hosting of a PlanetLab Europe
- server node.)
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1.3 Managers and standard users
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- There are two classes of OneLab user: the manager and the standard user. OneLab grants access rights to managers, who, in turn, provide access rights to
- standard users. Examples are: for a small enterprise, an executive may be the manager and the employees may be standard users; for a research team, a
- senior scientist (faculty member or research scientist) may be a manager and doctoral students and other members of the team may be standard users; for a
- university course, a professor may be a manager and the students may be standard users.
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1.4 These terms and conditions
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- Acceptance of these terms and conditions is a condition of obtaining OneLab Basic level user service. They are posted to the OneLab portal site
- (portal.onelab.eu). They may be changed without other notice than the posting of a new version to the portal site.
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2 Services provided by OneLab
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2.1 Access to the experimental facility
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- OneLab provides users with access to the platforms that make up the experimental facility. Each platform owner determines the specifics of this access (for
- example, how many nodes are available to a user, what happens in case of oversubscription, etc.), with the proviso that Basic level service requires that
- users be able to conduct meaningful experiments on every OneLab testbed.
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- Basic level service may also provide access to platforms that are federated with OneLab, but such access depends upon the terms of the federation
- agreements with those platforms, which may require that the user have a higher level of service in order to gain access. For example, Basic level service
- provides access to PlanetLab Europe, a OneLab platform, without providing access to PlanetLab Central, a federated platform. Users wanting full access
- across the global PlanetLab system should contact support@onelab.eu to arrange to enter into a PlanetLab Europe membership agreement.
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OneLab's role is to facilitate access to the platforms. Specifically, it provides each user with:
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- a single account,
- the credentials for which can be used to access all of the OneLab testbeds;
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- tools through which to access the testbeds
- , including, notably, a web-based portal (portal.onelab.eu) that allows a user to see the resources available on each testbed and to reserve them,
- along with a number of experiment control tools that a user can employ to deploy an experiment on those resources;
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- support
- , with documentation on how to use the tools, pointers to documentation for individual testbeds, and a helpdesk to respond to user questions.
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- Additional support, such as accompaniment through the design and deployment of experiments and the interpretation of their results, is available through
- higher levels of service.
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- 2.2 Best effort, without guarantees
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- OneLab and the owners of the individual OneLab testbeds do their best to provide the services outlined here, with the understanding that Basic level
- service offers no guarantees. Users should clearly understand the following limitations.
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- Reliability:
- OneLab does not provide any guarantees with respect to the reliability of the portal, of other tools, or of the individual nodes on platforms. These
- may be taken down for maintenance, rebooted, or reinstalled at any time. Reinstallation implies that disks are wiped, meaning that users should not
- consider a local disk to be a persistent form of storage.
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- Fitness:
- OneLab does not guarantee that the platforms are suitable for the experiments that users intend to conduct. There may be limitations in the
- technologies that are offered that prevent certain types of experiments from being carried out.
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- Privacy
- : OneLab does not guarantee the privacy of traffic generated on the platforms (e.g., wireless signals, packets). Unless otherwise specified by an
- individual platform owner, users should assume that traffic is monitored and logged. Such monitoring may be done intentionally, for example, to allow
- platform administrators as well as other users to investigate abuse.
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- Users who seek such guarantees are invited to consider a higher level of service.
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- In no event shall the partners of the OneLab consortium be liable to any user for any consequential, incidental, punitive, or lost profit damages, or for
- any damages arising out of loss of use or loss of data, to the extent that such damages arise out of the activities of OneLab consortium partners, or any
- breach of the present terms and conditions, even if the consortium partner has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
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- Nothing contained in these terms and conditions shall be deemed as creating any rights or liabilities in or for third parties who are not Basic level users
- of OneLab.
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- 3 Acceptable use policy
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- 3.1 Responsibilities of managers and standard users
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- OneLab creates and administers accounts for managers and delegates to managers the responsibility for creating and administering accounts for standard
- users. Both managers and standard users are required to follow OneLab's acceptable use policy. In addition, managers are fully responsible for the
- activities of the standard users whose accounts they create.
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- A manager is expected to grant user access only an individual with whom he or she has a working relationship. In general, this means an individual who
- works for the same institution as the manager, or, in the case of higher education and research, an individual who is a student at the university where the
- manager works. Managers may also grant access to individuals from other institutions, provided that they are collaborating on a common project on OneLab.
- If there is a doubt, a manager should refer the question to support@onelab.eu.
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- 3.2 Types of use
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- OneLab may be used by enterprise, by scientific researchers, and by educators.
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- OneLab may be used for pre-commercial research and development. In keeping with OneLab's not-for-profit status, it may not be used to deploy services that
- are designed to generate a commercial profit.
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- Not-for-profit use of OneLab to deploy services that are designed to generate revenue requires prior approval through a written agreement, and thus may not
- be carried out on a Basic level account. Interested users are invited to contact support@onelab.eu.
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- OneLab may be used for scientific research.
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- OneLab may be used to host lab exercises for university courses.
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- Questions about other types of use should be addressed to support@onelab.eu.
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- 3.3 Applicable laws and regulations
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- OneLab is managed, and the portal is hosted, in France. Information regarding the countries in which individual testbeds are managed and hosted is
- available from those testbeds. Users are responsible for being aware of the countries in which their experiments are deployed and for ensuring that their
- use of OneLab fully conforms to the laws and regulations of those countries, as well as the laws and regulations of the country in which they themselves
- are present when conducting their experiments.
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- Above and beyond specific national laws, the activities email spamming, phishing through web services, and all types of Internet fraud are prohibited on
- OneLab.
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- 3.4 Security and accounting mechanisms
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- Users are expected to respect the security and accounting mechanisms put in place by OneLab, its platforms, and federated platforms. For example, access to
- PlanetLab Europe is designed to take place through the SSH cryptographically-secured connection protocol, which uses public/private key pair
- authentication, and so users should not attempt to bypass this mechanism. As another example, OneLab's notion of a "slice" associates a set of resources
- with the group of users who have reserved those resources, and users should not attempt to obscure the identities of participants in a slice.
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- Hacking attempts against the OneLab portal and testbeds are not permitted. This includes "red team" (hacker test) experiments.
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- 3.5 Sharing of resources
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- OneLab is intended for ambitious experiments. Large numbers of resources and extended leases on resources may legitimately be granted in order to carry
- these out. At the same time, OneLab and its testbeds are shared environments, and when there is contention for resources, limits must be imposed.
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- Each OneLab platform sets its own policies for handling resource contention. As a general rule, users are encouraged to design their experiments to use
- resources efficiently. In particular, spinning/busy-waiting techniques for extended periods of time are strongly discouraged. Some resource contention
- policies (e.g., PlanetLab Europe's) terminate the jobs that are using the most resources in the case of contention.
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- 3.6 Internet-connected platforms
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- Some of OneLab's platforms allow experiments to take place on resources that have access to the public internet. These experiments can potentially generate
- traffic to, and receive traffic from, any host or router in the internet.[LB1]
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- Furthermore, some internet-connected platforms (e.g., PlanetLab Europe) consist of servers that are hosted by a large number of member institutions.
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- The accessibility of internet-connected platforms and the distributed hosting model of some of these platforms imply certain responsibilities on the part
- of users, as detailed below.
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- 3.6.1 General guidance
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- A good litmus test when considering whether an experiment is appropriate for such internet-connected platforms is to ask what the network administrator at
- one's own organisation would say about the experiment running locally. If the experiment disrupts local activity (e.g., uses more than its share of the
- site's internet bandwidth) or triggers complaints from remote network administrators (e.g., performs systematic port scans), then it is not appropriate for
- such internet-connected platforms.
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- It is the responsibility of the user and the user's manager to ensure that an application that will run on an internet-connected platform is tested and
- debugged in a controlled environment, to better understand its behaviour prior to deployment.
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- 3.6.2 Standards of network etiquette
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- Internet-connected platforms are designed to support experiments that generate unusual traffic, such as network measurements. However, it is expected that
- all users adhere to widely accepted standards of network etiquette in an effort to minimise complaints from network administrators. Activities that have
- been interpreted as worm and denial-of-service attacks in the past (and should be avoided) include sending SYN packets to port 80 on random machines,
- probing random IP addresses, repeatedly pinging routers, overloading bottleneck links with measurement traffic, and probing a single target machine from
- many nodes.
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- For internet-connected platforms that have a distributed hosting model, each host institution will have its own acceptable use policy. Users should not
- knowingly violate such local policies. Conflicts between local policies and OneLab's stated goal of supporting research into wide-area networks should be
- brought to the attention of OneLab administrators at support@onelab.eu.
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- 3.6.3 Specific network usage rules
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- It is not allowed to use one or more nodes of an internet-connected platform to generate a high number of network flows or flood a site with high traffic
- to the point of interfering with its normal operation. Use of congestion-controlled flows for large transfers is highly encouraged.
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- It is not allowed to perform systematic or random port or address block scans from an internet-connected platform.
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- For internet-connected platforms that use a distributed hosting model, it is not allowed to spoof or sniff traffic on a hosted server or on the network the
- server belongs to.
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- Access to a server on a distributed hosting platform may not be used to gain access to other servers or networked equipment that are not part of the
- testbed.
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- 3.7 Wireless platforms
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- Wireless-connected platforms give users access to nodes that communicate via Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies. They may be capable of detecting
- wireless activity in the neighbourhood of those nodes: traffic generated by other users of the platform or by individuals not associated with the platform.
- In general, much of the traffic will be encrypted, with certain aspects (such as SSIDs) not encrypted, but it is also possible that there will be fully
- unencrypted traffic. They may also be capable of generating wireless activity that reaches equipment outside of the testbed.
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- Furthermore, some wireless-connected platforms may have built-in limitations to prevent them from generating signals at a strength that exceeds health and
- safety regulations.
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- These characteristics of wireless-connected platforms imply certain responsibilities on the part of users, as detailed below.
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- 3.7.1 Specific network usage rules
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- Experimenters may make no attempt to defeat the encryption of encrypted third-party traffic. Furthermore, experimenters must treat with utmost discretion
- any unencrypted traffic. Limited metadata can be recorded for the bona fide purposes of an experiment, but under no case should third party communications
- be recorded.
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- No attempt may be made to reverse engineer traffic in order to learn the identities of the parties who have generated the traffic.
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- Wireless-connected platforms may not be used to gain access to any network equipment that is not part of the testbed itself.
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- It is not allowed to perform systematic or random scans of wireless networks that are not part of a wireless-connected platform. Similarly, it is not
- allowed to spoof or sniff wireless traffic of the institution that hosts a wireless-connected platform or of other networks in the proximity.
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- Care must be taken so that traffic on wireless-connected platforms does not interfere with the normal functioning of network equipment that is not part of
- the testbed itself.
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- No attempt may be made to defeat the mechanisms that limit signal strength on wireless-connected platforms.
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- 3.8 Handling suspected violations
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- Suspected violations of the OneLab acceptable use policy should be reported to support@onelab.eu.
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- Upon notification or detection of a possible violation, OneLab management will attempt to understand if a violation has in fact occurred. To do so,
- management will freely communicate with the users concerned, the operators of the platforms concerned, as well as any third parties that might be involved.
- An example of a third party is a network operator who detects what they believe to be unauthorized traffic emanating from a OneLab platform.
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- The priority is to resolve any real or apparent violations amicably. However, if OneLab management believes that a violation may have occurred, it can, at
- its sole discretion, and without prior notice, apply any of the following measures:
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- notification of the users of the concerned slice (set of resources);
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- disabling of the concerned slice;
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- disabling an individual user's account;
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- reporting of the user's activity to his/her manager;
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- disabling of the manager's account and all user accounts for which the manager is responsible;
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- disabling of all accounts associated with the user's institution.
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- In the case of suspected illegal activity, OneLab management might need, without prior notice, to notify the relevant authorities.
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