Progress Report 1: A successful week

This week's Progress

• Met with City of Madison Metro Transit Head of IT to discuss needs of the city and explore ways in which MAR could be useful.  Proposed to Meet the week of March 3 to give a quick demo of MAR and set up the Bus Testbed.
• Solved DHCP auto-configuration with a Open-source piece of software called "dnsmasq." Now MAR will assign IP addresses and DNS names to any client attempting to connect through it.
• Became more acclimated to the MAR code-base written by Sharad. This is an iterative process as he is finishing implementing the TCP implementation by Feb 25th.

Current Status

• The Team has added Two more members, Nick Leaf and Paul White. We will be dividing up team roles this Sunday to distribute the work load and maximize human utility :)
• Robustness is the main short term goal. With a basic prototype implemented, we now need to work to ensure that the "Law of demos" does not work against us.

Short term Robustness Goals

• Ensure that an interface failure does not require a full system restart.  If a card goes down, we need to recover it and add it back into the list of indexed interfaces. Also we need to Close any TCP connections still assigned to the old interface and send an error message to the connection's corresponding client.
• We also need to implement connection timers for the case that a client leaves the network without closing its connection.  The timer would be its own thread scanning the list of connections for expired timeouts and remove any connections that are stale.
• This sunday we will be setting up a timeline for the rest of the semester to budget the workload.

Long Term System Goals

• Figure Out the interface between the current Metro transit system and the Bus Finder system.
• Set up Web Application Testbed for Bus Finder Development (Notice this has been pushed back to ensure prototype robustness).
• Rework MAR on a Per-Packet based implementation.