The LANforge system consists of a single manager process, and one or more traffic generator machines (clients/cards). The cards are connected to the manager over an Ethernet management interface so that all management traffic is out-of-band, which ensures accurate reports regardless of the state of the network under test. Only the data-producing ports should be connected to the device or devices under test.
The LANforge Manager runs the management server, and potentially, the LANforge-GUI (graphical user interface). Because the LANforge-GUI connects to the manager over TCP/IP, it can be run remotely, and because it is written in Java, it will work on many different types of computers, including Windows, Solaris, and Linux. Depending on your hardware and speed requirements, you can also run the GUI, Management Server, and traffic-generation server on a single Linux system. That allows the minimum LANforge-FIRE installation to be a single machine with 2 or more Ethernet interfaces.
In order to have a fully functional LANforge-FIRE testing system, you will need at least one of the Data Generator units with at least two Ethernet ports. From this basic configuration, you can add more data generators and more ports to each data generator. If you do not have Candela's Linux kernel patches installed, the minimal configuration is two machines with at least one port each.
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