How To Make The EFF ISP Throttling Tool Work On Leopard

Posted by admin
August 2, 2008

Switzerland LogoI love the idea of Switzerland, the new EFF tool for checking ISP throttling; unfortunately as of release Zero.0.5, Leopard seems to still be a mere afterthought. Here is how I worked around the few things that were not working out of the box.

First, Switzerland is written in Python and will require Psyco. It’s a good thing since Psyco is all about performance. If you do not have it already installed:

?View Code BASH
svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/psyco/dist/ psyco-dist
cd psyco-dist/
sudo python setup.py install
cd ..

Download Switzerland from https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=233013
Extract it and change to its directory; eg

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tar zxvf switzerland-0.0.5.tgz
cd switzerland-0.0.5

The FastCollector provided doesn’t work. So…

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rm bin/FastCollector.darwin

Now when we build FastCollector, it will be available in /usr/local/bin/FastCollector

Here comes the only moderately scary thing for non-developers. Use the patch command to modify switzerland/client/PacketListener.py. This is the input for patch:

?View Code BASH
diff --git a/switzerland/client/PacketListener.py b/switzerland/client/PacketListener.py
index 211b68f..dc0bbcc 100755
--- a/switzerland/client/PacketListener.py
+++ b/switzerland/client/PacketListener.py
@@ -93,8 +93,7 @@ class PacketListener(threading.Thread):
         p = platform.system()
         # Implementing the recommendations from
         # http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/research/hppc/
-        if p[-3:] == "BSD" or p == "Darwin":
-          print p
+        if p[-3:] == "BSD":
           cmd = ["sysctl","-w","net.bpf.bufsize=10485760"]
           try:     # Recent FreeBSDs
             proc = Popen(cmd, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE)
@@ -110,6 +109,14 @@ class PacketListener(threading.Thread):
             proc = Popen(cmd, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE)
             assert proc.wait() == 0
 
+        elif p == "Darwin":
+          cmd = ["sysctl","-w","debug.bpf_bufsize=10485760"]
+          proc = Popen(cmd, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE)
+          assert proc.wait() == 0
+          cmd[2] = "debug.bpf_maxbufsize=10485760"
+          proc = Popen(cmd, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE)
+          assert proc.wait() == 0
+
         elif p == "Linux":
           vars = [("/proc/sys/net/core/rmem_default", "33554432"),
                   ("/proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max", "33554432"),

Let’s build and install everything:

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sudo python setup.py install

Well, it was easy (if it worked!)

Let’s create a log directory for Switzerland:

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sudo mkdir /var/log/switzerland-pcaps
sudo chmod a+wx /var/log/switzerland-pcaps

And finally let’s run it:

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sudo switzerland-client

or if you wish to run your own server (you need to advertise it too!)

?View Code BASH
sudo switzerland-client --server yourserveraddress

Questions?

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