Measurement-Lab, running PlanetLab software on 600 servers world-wide, answers 20,000+ Google queries every day asking "how fast is my internet."

A Measurement-Lab study of ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance sheds light on the dispute between ISPs and Netflix. Articles in the press help interpret the results.

Due to the recent Shellshock bash vulnerability, slices exposing externally accessible interfaces should upgrade to a patched version of bash. Updated bash packages compatible with older slice images can be found at http://www.planet-lab.org/bash/

The PlanetLab BootCD has been updated to use the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel. The new version should address the issue of several sites not being able to bring up nodes with recent hardware.

After many years of using Linux vserver as PlanetLab's node provisioning mechanism, we have officially started migrating to LXC - the implementation of container-based virtualization in the Linux kernel. We have been working on this new release for several months and are pleased to announce that it has become stable and mature enough to deploy for users. Here are some of the highlights of the update...

The FCC launches a "beta" consumer broadband test on broadband.gov on March 11th. The site uses Measurement Lab (M-Lab) as its back-end platform. M-Lab is a private deployment of PlanetLab spanning 15 sites across the US and Europe.

PlanetLab Central (PLC) will be upgraded to Version 4.3 over the next few weeks. 4.3 includes features that will make it easier to support new types of nodes (e.g., wireless), as well as new GUI features. It also involves a few changes to the programmatic API. Users that run scripts against this API will need to modify those scripts. Click here for a summary of the API changes.

The PlanetLab Consortium joins Google and the Open Technology Institute in creating Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a distributed server platform for deploying Internet measurement tools. M-Lab is designed to empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections.

A paper describing our experiences operating PlanetLab over the past six years, and in particular, how we resolved disputes involving PlanetLab experiments, is now available (here) for review and comment.

A prototype implementation of the GENI interfaces to PlanetLab functionality is now available. The module, called geniwrapper, is available at http://svn.planet-lab.org/. Preliminary testing of geniwrapper on the live system will begin in the next few weeks.