...on 2023-01-09 11:37:25, Gert Doering wrote:
Having probes out there with wildly varying firmware is not helping measurement accuracy.
I don't think that's directly comparable to hardware probes. For example, there's a software probe running in a VM behind my residential DSL line. The availability of the tags "VDSL2" and "Homelab" (for example) made that seem like not a completely absurd setup. I was about to spawn a couple of software probes as VMs in various places at work. (I could probably request hardware probes, but VMs are much less of a hassle in terms of internal management processes.) Still, even the latter will probably be less accurate than hardware probes, being a (possibly low-priority) virtualized workload. As for updates, I would really like to have that automated away, preferably out of the box. When I installed the first software probe, I for some reason didn't notice there were RPM packages available, and went with the manual install on my preferred distribution. Now I know there's the RPMs and I can have them updated, I'll go that way with the next setup. I don't remember how I noticed there was an update last time - maybe some warning in the portal can act as a reminder when a probe is out of date? Would it be useful to package the probe as something like a Docker container, even though that's yet more indirection in terms of network access? I have the impression that nowadays more people are prepared to manage that kind of thing instead of a distribution package... Alex.