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Flacktutorial

Welcome to the Flack tutorial!

Welcome to the Flack tutorial!

Preparation

If you aren't familiar with GENI terms, like what an authority is, check out the short explanation of various terms used.

Follow the directions for becoming a GENI user and logging in to Flack.

At this point you should start to see resources being added to the map.

Creating a Blank Slice

Once the spinner at the top has stopped and resources have been added to the map, you will be ready to create a slice. Click the wand.png New slice button under Slices in the building.png Resources tab on the left pane and enter a name. You may be prompted again if the name is in use or invalid. When you see a blank canvas appear that means you are ready to add and allocate resources.

Adding and Configuring Resources

To the left of the slice window you will see the dashboard (in the resources.png Resources tab by default) which includes a list of managers which have resources you can ask for. Choose a manager (like utahemulab.cm) and drag a PC or VM (available to the right of the manager name) onto the canvas. You've just stagged a PC or VM in your slice! Drag another PC or VM (whichever you didn't choose the first time) from the same manager onto the canvas. Place the mouse near either of the nodes and click and drag when you see a line being drawn from the node. When the mouse hovers above another node you should see green if the link can be drawn so you should release the mouse key. You've just staged a link between the two nodes! Easy right?

Allocating Resources

Resources added onto the canvas are only staged and not allocated yet. Let's allocate the nodes by clicking 'Submit' at the bottom left of the slice window. Click OK to confirm the submission. Now you can wait and watch the status change at each aggregate in the Slice tab on the left where the resources tab used to be. Once all of the resources are ready you should see a green canvas and green backgrounds in the nodes. This will take anywhere from a minute to a few minutes so feel free to explore the system_monitor.png Tasks & Logs (top of the main left pane) while you're waiting. The console lists all of the XML-RPC and HTTP calls and other various messages. If you eventually see green that means the experiment was created and booted successfully.

Deallocating Resources

Since you probably don't need the resources now, why not let someone else use them? To release all resources which were allocated to the slice, click the delete.png Delete button near the bottom of the Slice tab in the dashboard. When the resources are released you will see them removed from the canvas.

Your slice is still available so feel free to explore at this point and perhaps try to create a different topology. You can even try connecting and allocating nodes from different managers or log into the nodes once they are allocated.

Learn More

For learning more about how to use Flack, see the main manual.