The Guthrie NODEDETAILS table contains a list of all the nodes involed in PingER analysis done from SLAC. It is stored in the SLACPROD Oracle instance under the IEPM user/schema.
Column specifications
Name |
Null? |
Data Type |
Use |
---|---|---|---|
NODENAME |
NOT NULL |
VARCHAR2(100) |
DNS host name |
IPADDRESS |
|
VARCHAR2(15) |
IPv4 address |
SITENAME |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
Domain name of the node |
NICKNAME |
|
VARCHAR2(35) |
Abstraction of the hostname with the TLD first 1 |
FULLNAME |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
Human-friendly description of the node/site |
LOCATION |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
City and/or State/Province/Region for node 2 |
COUNTRY |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
Country for node |
CONTINENT |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
Continent or region where node is thought to be located 3 |
LATANDLONG |
|
VARCHAR2(25) |
Latitude and longitude of node |
PROJECTTYPE |
|
VARCHAR2(10) |
Flags describing how nodes are used 4 |
PINGSERVER |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
URL for requesting a ping from this node to another 5 |
TRACESERVER |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
URL for requesting a traceroute from this node to another 5 |
DATASERVER |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
URL for retrieving PingER data from this node 5 |
URL |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
URL for the home page for the institution running the node |
GMT |
|
VARCHAR2(10) |
Node's time offset from GMT, not used |
COMMENTS |
|
VARCHAR2(4000) |
Comments and notes on when and how the node's record was last updated 6 |
APP_USER |
|
VARCHAR2(20) |
Windows user name of the last user to edit the node's record through the UI |
CONTACTS |
|
VARCHAR2(100) |
Name and email address(es) of the node's maintainer(s) |
PING_SIZE |
|
NUMBER |
Size of pings to be sent to the node - only controls SLAC's PingER install |
1 This field should be of the form: TLD.Rest of site domain.N# where # is a sequential number assigned to each node at a site. For non-US hosts not using their country code TLD, u8se the country code TLD at the start of the identifier and include the actual TLD in the site domain string. Examples:
- EDU.SLAC.STANFORD.N3 - third node at SLAC, hostname pinger.slac.stanford.edu
- CH.CERN.N2 - second node at CERN, hostname wanmoninst1.cern.ch
- AO.UCAN.EDU.N1 - first node at the Catholic University of Angola, hostname www.ucan.edu
2 Location information is either provided by the site or is based off a geographic IP database like GeoIPTool.
3 Some continents are broken up into sub-regions. A list of countries and continents can be seen at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/mon/countries.txt.
4 The various single character flags are described at: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/slaconly/nodedetails-readme.
5 These URLs should point to the complete URL for the script at the site, including the trailing '?' used to start the list of parameters to the script. If the script is not installed at the site or the service is not available (i.e. the site is not a PingER monitoring host), set the field to NOT-SET.
6 The usual format of the comments is: <action>, by <username> <mm/dd/yy>.
User interface
A user interface for the table was created in Oracle's HTML DB / Application Express and can be accessed at https://oraweb.slac.stanford.edu/apex/slacprod/f?p=123:1. Authorized users are authenticated by their SLAC Windows credentials.
The UI allows for the creation, search, modification, and deletion of nodes. As a rule, nodes should not be deleted from the database for referential integrity reasons -- even though there is only one table in the database, various processes use this table in concert with the flat files that contain the raw and analyzed PingER results.
Inside the UI, the country and continent (region) are set and restricted to a pop-up list of values. The pop-up list is based on a separate table called COUNTRY. New countries can be added to the list by creating new rows in the COUNTRY table with SQL INSERT statements. Example:
insert into country (country_id, country, continent, tld) values (country_seq.nextval, 'Bermuda', 'Latin America', 'bm')
The COUNTRY table is not used except by the list of values in the UI. Note that if a country name needs to be changed or if a country was placed in the wrong region, it must be updated on all the nodes in the NODEDETAILS table as well as on the COUNTRY table.