PeerPressure &
Friends Troubleshooting Network (FTN)
Overview
PeerPressure
Technical support contributes 17% of the total cost of ownership of today's
desktop PCs [25]. An important element of technical support is
troubleshooting miscon- figured applications. Misconfiguration
troubleshooting is particularly challenging, because configuration
information is shared and altered by multiple applications. To this end, we
developed a novel troubleshooting system: PeerPressure, which uses
statistics from a set of sample machines to diagnose the root-cause
misconfigurations on a sick machine. This is in contrast with methods that
require manual identification on a healthy machine for diagnosing
misconfigurations [30]. The elimination of this manual operation makes a
significant step towards automated misconfiguration troubleshooting. In
PeerPressure, we introduce a ranking metric for misconfiguration
candidates. This metric is based on empirical Bayesian estimation. We have
prototyped a PeerPressure troubleshooting system and used a database of 87
machine configuration snapshots to evaluate its performance. With 20
real-world troubleshooting cases, PeerPressure can effectively pinpoint the
root-cause misconfigurations for 12 of these cases. For the remaining cases,
PeerPressure significantly narrows down the number of root-cause candidates
by three orders of magnitude.
Friends Troubleshooting Network (FTN)
Content sharing is a popular use of peer-to-peer systems because of their
inherent scalability and low cost of maintenance. We leverage this nature
of peer-to-peer systems to gather configuration samples needed by the
PeerPressure troubleshooter (see above). The key challenges are preserving
privacy of individual configuration data and ensuring the integrity of peer
contributions. To this end, we construct the Friends Troubleshooting
Network (FTN), a peer-to-peer overlay network, where the links between peer
machines reflect the friendship of their owners. Our FTN manifests
recursive trust rather than transitive trust. To achieve privacy, we use
the general scheme of a source-less and destination-less random-walk for
routing, during which search is carried out simultaneously with secure
parameter aggregation for the purpose of troubleshooting. Our design has
been guided by the characteristics of a real-world friends network, the MSN
Instant Messenger (IM) network. We have prototyped our FTN system and
analyzed the tradeoff between privacy and protocol efficiency.
Publications
Automatic Misconfiguration Troubleshooting with PeerPressure
Helen J. Wang, John C. Platt, Yu Chen, Ruyun Zhang, Yi-Min Wang
Usenix OSDI, December, 2004 San Francisco, CA
[pdf]
[html]
Friends Troubleshooting Network: Towards Privacy-Preserving, Automatic Troubleshooting
Helen J. Wang, Yih-Chun Hu, Chun Yuan, Zheng Zhang, and Yi-Min Wang
The 3rd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS 2004), San Diego, CA; Feb 26-27, 2004
[pdf]
[ps]
Privacy-Preserving Friends Troubleshooting Network
Qiang Huang, Helen J. Wang, and Nikita Borisov
ISOC NDSS 2005, Feb, San Diego, CA
[pdf]
Applications of Secure Electronic Voting to Automated Privacy-Preserving Troubleshooting
David Jao, Qiang Huang, and Helen J. Wang
ACM CCS, November, 2005
[pdf]
Contact: Helen J. Wang
Last update: August 17, 2005