[atlas] software probe use cases (was: Encouraging people to upgrade software probe versions)

...on 2023-01-09 11:37:25, Gert Doering wrote:

 > Having probes out there with wildly varying firmware is not helping
 > measurement accuracy.

I don't think that's directly comparable to hardware probes. For 
example, there's a software probe running in a VM behind my 
residential DSL line. The availability of the tags "VDSL2" and 
"Homelab" (for example) made that seem like not a completely 
absurd setup.

I was about to spawn a couple of software probes as VMs in various 
places at work. (I could probably request hardware probes, but 
VMs are much less of a hassle in terms of internal management 
processes.)

Still, even the latter will probably be less accurate than hardware 
probes, being a (possibly low-priority) virtualized workload.

As for updates, I would really like to have that automated away, 
preferably out of the box. When I installed the first software probe, 
I for some reason didn't notice there were RPM packages available, 
and went with the manual install on my preferred distribution. 
Now I know there's the RPMs and I can have them updated, I'll 
go that way with the next setup.

I don't remember how I noticed there was an update last time -
maybe some warning in the portal can act as a reminder when a probe 
is out of date?

Would it be useful to package the probe as something like a 
Docker container, even though that's yet more indirection in terms 
of network access? I have the impression that nowadays more people 
are prepared to manage that kind of thing instead of a distribution 
package...

Alex.