Overview

BBCP is a point-to-point network file copy application developed at SLAC. It was initially used by the BaBar Collaboration to transfer massive amounts of data between numerious sites of the Collaboration. The protocol has been specifically designed for WAN. In particular, it allows sending data in multiple simultaneous streams.

This document gives only some tips that are intended to help readers to begin using the tool. To find the complete documentation on the tool please visit the official site: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~abh/bbcp/.

Installation

BBCP is easy to install. Installation basically involves placing the bbcp executable in your path on all the systems you want to use it on. All standard methods of authentication can be used: passwords and certificates. Though, note that we're only ging to support the password-based authentication based on SLAC UNIX (Kerberos) accounts.

Versions of BBCP are available for most major flavors of UNIX, including Linux and Solaris.

• NOTE: BBCP is NOT available for Windows. Should this be a problem consider other methods of data exportation which are presented in the parent document.

Since BBCP is a peer-to-peer application then no permenently running server process is required - you just invoke the bbcp executabe on a source machine and in response another bbcp executable is started on the target machine. A more sophisticated scenario involves using the three-party scheme: the source and target machines do not need to be the same (third) machine that you initiate the file transfer from. Please, consult the official BBCP documentation for further detail on that subject. At the mean time, all examples presented in the current document will be based on a simple two-party mode.

The first step is to download the TAR file
The tool is available here: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~abh/bbcp/bbcp.tar.Z

After unpacking the TAR file, we advise rebuilding the executable from the source, on each different Linux platform you install it on.

Usage

Tuneup

Usefull links

• http://pcbunn.cithep.caltech.edu/bbcp/using_bbcp.htm - the link provides usefull tips on tuning up TCP parameters on machines involved into the data transfer.