2 for OneLab Basic level service
4 Version 0.6 of 20 May 2014
6 <a href="/portal/terms" target="_blank">[Printable format]</a>
8 <h1 align="left">1 Context</h1>
9 <h2 align="left">1.1 OneLab</h2>
11 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
12 platforms, including:</p>
15 <strong>internet overlay testbeds</strong>
16 , testbeds that offer virtual machines distributed across locations in different countries, allowing users to deploy overlays on the internet;
19 <strong>wireless testbeds</strong>
20 , 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
24 <strong>internet of things testbeds</strong>
25 , testbeds that consist of embedded computing nodes with sensor capabilities, communicating wirelessly in an isolated environment;
28 <strong>emulation testbeds,</strong>
29 computing clusters that offer virtual machines on servers that are interconnected by a high speed switch, enabling large scale network emulation.
33 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
34 on the OneLab website (onelab.eu).</p>
36 Each platform has its own owners, and OneLab is the grouping of these platforms through a consortium of institutions. The OneLab consortium is coordinated
37 by UPMC Sorbonne Universités. It operates on a not-for-profit basis.</p>
39 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
40 of those platforms.</p>
41 <h2 align="left">1.2 Fee-free Basic level service</h2>
42 <p align="left">These terms and conditions define and apply to OneLab's Basic level service, which is available free of charge.</p>
44 Users who would like additional services are encouraged to contact support@onelab.eu. Some additional services require a written agreement, but are
45 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
47 <h2 align="left">1.3 Managers and standard users</h2>
49 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
50 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
51 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
52 university course, a professor may be a manager and the students may be standard users.</p>
53 <h2 align="left">1.4 These terms and conditions</h2>
55 Acceptance of these terms and conditions is a condition of obtaining OneLab Basic level user service. They are posted to the OneLab portal site
56 (portal.onelab.eu). They may be changed without other notice than the posting of a new version to the portal site.</p>
57 <h1 align="left">2 Services provided by OneLab</h1>
58 <h2 align="left">2.1 Access to the experimental facility</h2>
60 OneLab provides users with access to the platforms that make up the experimental facility. Each platform owner determines the specifics of this access (for
61 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
62 users be able to conduct meaningful experiments on every OneLab testbed.</p>
64 Basic level service may also provide access to platforms that are federated with OneLab, but such access depends upon the terms of the federation
65 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
66 provides access to PlanetLab Europe, a OneLab platform, without providing access to PlanetLab Central, a federated platform. Users wanting full access
67 across the global PlanetLab system should contact support@onelab.eu to arrange to enter into a PlanetLab Europe membership agreement.</p>
68 <p align="left">OneLab's role is to facilitate access to the platforms. Specifically, it provides each user with:</p>
71 <strong>a single account,</strong>
72 the credentials for which can be used to access all of the OneLab testbeds;
75 <strong>tools through which to access the testbeds</strong>
76 , 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,
77 along with a number of experiment control tools that a user can employ to deploy an experiment on those resources;
80 <strong>support</strong>
81 , with documentation on how to use the tools, pointers to documentation for individual testbeds, and a helpdesk to respond to user questions.
85 Additional support, such as accompaniment through the design and deployment of experiments and the interpretation of their results, is available through
86 higher levels of service.
89 2.2 Best effort, without guarantees
92 OneLab and the owners of the individual OneLab testbeds do their best to provide the services outlined here, with the understanding that Basic level
93 service offers no guarantees. Users should clearly understand the following limitations.
97 <strong>Reliability:</strong>
98 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
99 may be taken down for maintenance, rebooted, or reinstalled at any time. Reinstallation implies that disks are wiped, meaning that users should not
100 consider a local disk to be a persistent form of storage.
103 <strong>Fitness:</strong>
104 OneLab does not guarantee that the platforms are suitable for the experiments that users intend to conduct. There may be limitations in the
105 technologies that are offered that prevent certain types of experiments from being carried out.
108 <strong>Privacy</strong>
109 : OneLab does not guarantee the privacy of traffic generated on the platforms (e.g., wireless signals, packets). Unless otherwise specified by an
110 individual platform owner, users should assume that traffic is monitored and logged. Such monitoring may be done intentionally, for example, to allow
111 platform administrators as well as other users to investigate abuse.
115 Users who seek such guarantees are invited to consider a higher level of service.
121 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
122 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
123 breach of the present terms and conditions, even if the consortium partner has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
126 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
130 3 Acceptable use policy
133 3.1 Responsibilities of managers and standard users
136 OneLab creates and administers accounts for managers and delegates to managers the responsibility for creating and administering accounts for standard
137 users. Both managers and standard users are required to follow OneLab's acceptable use policy. In addition, managers are fully responsible for the
138 activities of the standard users whose accounts they create.
141 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
142 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
143 manager works. Managers may also grant access to individuals from other institutions, provided that they are collaborating on a common project on OneLab.
144 If there is a doubt, a manager should refer the question to support@onelab.eu.
150 OneLab may be used by enterprise, by scientific researchers, and by educators.
153 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
154 are designed to generate a commercial profit.
157 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
158 be carried out on a Basic level account. Interested users are invited to contact support@onelab.eu.
161 OneLab may be used for scientific research.
164 OneLab may be used to host lab exercises for university courses.
167 Questions about other types of use should be addressed to support@onelab.eu.
170 3.3 Applicable laws and regulations
173 OneLab is managed, and the portal is hosted, in France. Information regarding the countries in which individual testbeds are managed and hosted is
174 available from those testbeds. Users are responsible for being aware of the countries in which their experiments are deployed and for ensuring that their
175 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
176 are present when conducting their experiments.
179 Above and beyond specific national laws, the activities email spamming, phishing through web services, and all types of Internet fraud are prohibited on
183 3.4 Security and accounting mechanisms
186 Users are expected to respect the security and accounting mechanisms put in place by OneLab, its platforms, and federated platforms. For example, access to
187 PlanetLab Europe is designed to take place through the SSH cryptographically-secured connection protocol, which uses public/private key pair
188 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
189 with the group of users who have reserved those resources, and users should not attempt to obscure the identities of participants in a slice.
192 Hacking attempts against the OneLab portal and testbeds are not permitted. This includes "red team" (hacker test) experiments.
195 3.5 Sharing of resources
198 OneLab is intended for ambitious experiments. Large numbers of resources and extended leases on resources may legitimately be granted in order to carry
199 these out. At the same time, OneLab and its testbeds are shared environments, and when there is contention for resources, limits must be imposed.
202 Each OneLab platform sets its own policies for handling resource contention. As a general rule, users are encouraged to design their experiments to use
203 resources efficiently. In particular, spinning/busy-waiting techniques for extended periods of time are strongly discouraged. Some resource contention
204 policies (e.g., PlanetLab Europe's) terminate the jobs that are using the most resources in the case of contention.
207 3.6 Internet-connected platforms
210 Some of OneLab's platforms allow experiments to take place on resources that have access to the public internet. These experiments can potentially generate
211 traffic to, and receive traffic from, any host or router in the internet.<a></a><a id="_anchor_1" href="#_msocom_1" name="_msoanchor_1">[LB1]</a>
214 Furthermore, some internet-connected platforms (e.g., PlanetLab Europe) consist of servers that are hosted by a large number of member institutions.
217 The accessibility of internet-connected platforms and the distributed hosting model of some of these platforms imply certain responsibilities on the part
218 of users, as detailed below.
221 3.6.1 General guidance
224 A good litmus test when considering whether an experiment is appropriate for such internet-connected platforms is to ask what the network administrator at
225 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
226 site's internet bandwidth) or triggers complaints from remote network administrators (e.g., performs systematic port scans), then it is not appropriate for
227 such internet-connected platforms.
230 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
231 debugged in a controlled environment, to better understand its behaviour prior to deployment.
234 3.6.2 Standards of network etiquette
237 Internet-connected platforms are designed to support experiments that generate unusual traffic, such as network measurements. However, it is expected that
238 all users adhere to widely accepted standards of network etiquette in an effort to minimise complaints from network administrators. Activities that have
239 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,
240 probing random IP addresses, repeatedly pinging routers, overloading bottleneck links with measurement traffic, and probing a single target machine from
244 For internet-connected platforms that have a distributed hosting model, each host institution will have its own acceptable use policy. Users should not
245 knowingly violate such local policies. Conflicts between local policies and OneLab's stated goal of supporting research into wide-area networks should be
246 brought to the attention of OneLab administrators at support@onelab.eu.
249 3.6.3 Specific network usage rules
252 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
253 to the point of interfering with its normal operation. Use of congestion-controlled flows for large transfers is highly encouraged.
256 It is not allowed to perform systematic or random port or address block scans from an internet-connected platform.
259 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
263 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
267 3.7 Wireless platforms
270 Wireless-connected platforms give users access to nodes that communicate via Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies. They may be capable of detecting
271 wireless activity in the neighbourhood of those nodes: traffic generated by other users of the platform or by individuals not associated with the platform.
272 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
273 unencrypted traffic. They may also be capable of generating wireless activity that reaches equipment outside of the testbed.
276 Furthermore, some wireless-connected platforms may have built-in limitations to prevent them from generating signals at a strength that exceeds health and
280 These characteristics of wireless-connected platforms imply certain responsibilities on the part of users, as detailed below.
283 3.7.1 Specific network usage rules
286 Experimenters may make no attempt to defeat the encryption of encrypted third-party traffic. Furthermore, experimenters must treat with utmost discretion
287 any unencrypted traffic. Limited metadata can be recorded for the bona fide purposes of an experiment, but under no case should third party communications
291 No attempt may be made to reverse engineer traffic in order to learn the identities of the parties who have generated the traffic.
294 Wireless-connected platforms may not be used to gain access to any network equipment that is not part of the testbed itself.
297 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
298 allowed to spoof or sniff wireless traffic of the institution that hosts a wireless-connected platform or of other networks in the proximity.
301 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
305 No attempt may be made to defeat the mechanisms that limit signal strength on wireless-connected platforms.
308 3.8 Handling suspected violations
311 Suspected violations of the OneLab acceptable use policy should be reported to support@onelab.eu.
314 Upon notification or detection of a possible violation, OneLab management will attempt to understand if a violation has in fact occurred. To do so,
315 management will freely communicate with the users concerned, the operators of the platforms concerned, as well as any third parties that might be involved.
316 An example of a third party is a network operator who detects what they believe to be unauthorized traffic emanating from a OneLab platform.
319 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
320 its sole discretion, and without prior notice, apply any of the following measures:
324 notification of the users of the concerned slice (set of resources);
327 disabling of the concerned slice;
330 disabling an individual user's account;
333 reporting of the user's activity to his/her manager;
336 disabling of the manager's account and all user accounts for which the manager is responsible;
339 disabling of all accounts associated with the user's institution.
343 In the case of suspected illegal activity, OneLab management might need, without prior notice, to notify the relevant authorities.
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