For projects releated to research, click here.

Personal Projects

The following are some side-projects undertaken by Pat Pannuto.

All of these projects are open source and freely available to all who may find them useful - they are all licenensed under the GPL (where appropriate).

  • Gmail-Notifier (2010)

    A rewrite of the original gmail-notify package for Linux. It is an enhanced version that fixes several issues found in the previous version, including suspend / resume issues, deadlocks, and graphical bugs related to notifications. Critically, it stores password information in the keyring as opposed to a flat file the user's home directory. In addition, it supports monitoring multiple inboxes.

  • Pellucid (2009)

    Pellucid is a young project desgined to ease the administration and distribution of virtual machines to students.

    Details of the architecture and design of Pellucid can be found in this slideshow (Google Docs)

    Currently, the Pellucid architecture is in place and running, as well as a few of the more basic management scripts. The following sites are currently hosted on Pellucid:

    In addition, the student project UmBus got its start using a Pellucid server, and has since graduated into a real, for-profit application developed by Scott Wolchok:

Professional GPL'd Projects

The following are GPL-compatible projects written by Pat Pannuto for Merit Network R&D.

  • PRTT (2010)

    PRTT is a program to passively monitor network latency in real time. Prtt utilizes Libpcap and the TCP handshake process to obtain packet round-trip time measurements. For each TCP connection it sees, it measures the time offset between each SYN and SYN-ACK, thereby obtaining a latency measurement. In this manner, prtt builds a database of known hosts and the latencies between them. The database can then be queried to generate round-trip times not only for each host pair, but also aggregate averages over any subnets or DNS entries.

  • OpenCALEA (2009)

    OpenCALEA is a project intiated by Merit Network Inc. whose goal is to develop simple OpenSource based tools that can help the Internet Service Provider community to meet their CALEA compliance needs.

    CALEA is a broad term for the federal wire-tapping laws ISPs must conform to (packet taps). OpenCalea-lite is a tool that can be used to automatically capture and transmit IP traffic from any number of taps to a unified collection point from a single control machine

  • StreamAnon (2009)

    Stream-anon is a daemon that sniffs IP traffic and reinjects it, optionally with various levels of anonymization or encryption.

    Stream-anon was originally written to ease the burden of testing network code. Often it is desirable to have an isolated network for development and testing, but to have a real amount of "background noise". Using stream-anon, traffic from a real network can be captured, copied and sanitized, and then injected into the test network