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Workspaces

This document describes the preconfigured workspaces of IoT-LAB. These workspaces contain all tools that can be used to interact with the different ressources of the testbed.

Introduction

In order to simplify the setup of all the required tools required for IoT-LAB usage, we provided several workspaces where they are already installed:

  • common development tools such as git, make, gdb, etc
  • IoT related tools: aiocoap, mqtt clients, etc
  • ARM GCC toolchains
  • tools for interacting directly with the devices: nc, serial_aggregator, sniffer_aggregator, etc
  • IoT-LAB CLI Tools
  • SSH-CLI
  • WS-CLI

The SSH frontends

An SSH frontend is available on each IoT-LAB site. From each frontend, you can directly access and interact with the devices hosted in the corresponding site.

To connect to an SSH frontend, you have to configure your SSH access. Once done, you will have access to the frontend of any site.

An SSH frontend can also be used to temporarily store your development files, experiment results, etc. You just have to make sure that you stay within the limits of the user allowed storage as described in the user account documentation.

Note: since IoT-LAB is made for experimentation, we recommend to retrieve your experiment locally, on your computer.

Sniffing and monitoring storage

When you enable a monitoring profile (for radio sniffing or power consumption) in an experiment, all results of the monitoring are stored in a specific directory in your user home directory:

  • for radio sniffing: ~/.iot-lab/<exp_id>/radio
  • for power consumption: ~/.iot-lab/<exp_id>/consumption

The monitoring data are stored in the OML format.

You can find more information on the different monitoring usage in the consumption monitoring and radio monitoring pages.

Shared directory with Open Linux boards

Each SSH frontend provides a directory that is shared with all Open Linux boards, such as the A8.

This is directory is located in ~/shared (formerly ~/A8).

You can use it to easily share firmwares or any kind of files between the frontend and the embedded Linux running on the Open Linux boards.

The virtual machine

In parallel of the SSH frontend, IoT-LAB provides a virtual machine which allow users to use IoT-LAB tools from their computer.

The IoT-LAB virtual machine is built using Packer. For details on the virtual machine setup, see this Github repository.

To run the virtual machine on your computer, you have to install VirtualBox.

For example, to install VirtualBox on Ubuntu:

$ sudo add-apt-repository multiverse
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox

Start the VM

The virtual machine is available in two formats.

Using the Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) file

An OVA file (Open Virtual Appliance format)

The OVA file has to be downloaded locally from here and imported directly in VirtualBox.

This VM already contains the iot-lab repository from where you can start with running the command:

$ make

Welcome to the IoT-LAB development environment setup.

targets:
	setup-aggregation-tools
	setup-cli-tools
	setup-contiki
	setup-iot-lab-contiki-ng
	setup-iot-lab.wiki
	setup-oml-plot-tools
	setup-openlab
	setup-riot
	setup-wsn430
	setup-zephyr

	pull

Using vagrant

Vagrant is a virtual machine environment management tool. To start the IoT-LAB virtual machine using Vagrant, you first have to clone the iot-lab repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/iot-lab/iot-lab

Then, from the iot-lab directory, run the commands:

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh