Tamale uses NIST Net, a network emulation package that runs on Linux, during research and development and testing of our products. NIST Net, which was developed and released to the public by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, allows a Linux PC set up as a router to emulate a wide variety of network conditions, e.g., packet loss, bandwidth throttling, etc. It's a very useful tool for examining how an application will work in the Real World, as opposed to on our cozy little gigabit LAN.

Although the NIST Net home page and mailing list are still up and running, neither is actively maintained by the original authors, and the NIST Net source code available for download is not compatible with recent Linux kernels, e.g., Fedora 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, or CentOS 5. Some folks on the mailing list have posted patches for getting NIST Net to compile on recent kernels. We independently developed our own local patches for making NIST Net compile on newer kernels, and we've taken things one step farther by packaging our changes in an RPM for easy building and deployment on RPM-based systems.

We hope that others will be able to benefit from our work in this area. Feel free to email comments, questions, suggestions or patches that are specific to our RPM (general questions about NIST Net should be directed to the mailing list) to nistnet@tamalesoftware.com, and we will respond as soon as we can.

We are distributing a source RPM, rather than a binary RPM, because NIST Net is compiled to work with a specific kernel version, and the odds are that you aren't using the same kernels we are. To use this RPM, download it onto the machine on which you want to run NIST Net, or on a different machine with the same kernel version, make sure you have the kernel-devel (with the same version as your kernel), libXext-devel and libXaw-devel packages installed, and run "rpmbuild --rebuild nistnet-2.0.12c-3tm.src.rpm" as root. This will produce a binary NIST Net RPM in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386, or wherever binary RPMs are configured to end up on your system, and you can then install that RPM and run NIST Net as described in the documentation on the home page.

Jonathan Kamens, Manager of Operations