Deploying Simple Bandwidth Scanner

So you want to run sbws for yourself. You will need

  • A machine to measure from, hereafter referred to as |scanner_nick|.
  • One or more webservers hosting a large file, hereafter referred to as |dests|.

Both |scanner_nick| and your |dests| should be on fast, well connected machines.

|scanner_nick| requirements

  • A fast, well connected machine on the Internet. Ideally its bandwidth should not be a limiting factor in measurements.
  • Linux host OS
  • Python 3, virtualenv
  • Tor installed with tor in your PATH

|dests| requirements

  • A fast, well connected machine on the Internet. Ideally its bandwidth should not be a limiting factor in measurements.
  • Some sort of webserver installed and running that supports HEAD and GET requests (apache and nginx fit this description)
  • Optional support for TLS
  • A large file; at the time of writing, at least 1 GiB in size

|scanner_nick| setup

Install sbws according to Installing Simple Bandwidth Scanner.

Make sure you have initialized sbws. If you haven’t already run sbws init, then enter your virtualenv and run it.

Inside |dotsbws| you will find config.ini. Open it with a text editor. it should be very simple. Let’s give our scanner a nickname. Add the following lines

[scanner]
nickname = D0ntD3@dOpen!nside

(Pick your own nickname. This one just demonstrates that you can use almost any character)

Congratulations, you’ve learned how to add a section to your config file and how to add an option to a section.

Remeber |dests|? We need to add them to config.ini. We’re going to assume you have two you are ready to use and one that isn’t quite ready yet.

[destinations]
foo = on
bar = on
baz = off

[destinations.foo]
url = http://fooshoomoo.com/sbws.bin

[destinations.bar]
url = https://barstoolsinc.com

[destinations.baz]
url = https://bazistan.com/ask/stan/where/the/file/is.exe

foo demonstrates a typical case.

bar demonstrates a case where you want to use HTTPS and want to assume the large file for sbws to download is at its default path (probably /sbws.bin).

baz demonstrates a disabled destination that sbws will ignore.