So Beeswarm has improved a lot over the last few weeks, and I have tried to summarize the changes here.
Traffic Pattern
In my last post, I had mentioned the Telnet and SSH Bees, which have much more intelligence now. Along with them, the FTP and SMTP bees have been updated too. The SMTP bee now uses a static mail archive (plans are to replace this with something more dynamic) to send emails from. The ftp client now checks what files are there on the Hive server before trying to download it.
An important aspect of the traffic pattern was the ability to configure when sessions should occur. In other words, the timings between the client sessions should follow the real world patterns. Things were a bit complicated here, because every protocol had to be handled differently. Now every bee has a specific range of time (of the day) for which it is active. We also have a slepp interval, and an activation probability. The activation probability will decide whether the client session will be performed the next time the bee is activated.
Loads of Bug Fixes/Improvements
A lot of minor bugs were fixed (or features implemented).
- Generation of self-signed cert/keys at startup
- Fixing of the HTTPS capability, which resulted in "ssl_rx_record_too_long" errors.
- Fixed a bug in packaging where one of the data files was not being copied.
All in all, getting things working is much more smoother now.
ISO Generation
This is one of the most exciting thing I've worked on. Ever. Beeswarm now let's users download pre-configured, bootable ISO images of the new Hives/Feeders which are created from the web-interface. And it's as simple as clicking "Download ISO". There were quite a bit of challenges here, but I'll save them for my next blog post ;)