Spamulator: the Internet on a laptop

We have developed an Internet simulator - the "Spamulator" - for a course on spam and spyware, a simulator that allows us to simulate the network services provided by a million domains. The Spamulator is lightweight in its resource usage, running on a single computer, and we currently have implementations for two different platforms. Students interact with the Spamulator using unmodified client software, like web browsers. Alternatively, students can write their own software to use the simulated Internet using any programming language, without contrived constraints or special libraries. Furthermore, the Spamulator is extensible, making it useful as a research tool. It could easily be used for assignments on networking, peer-to-peer networks, distributed systems, and its lightweight nature allows large-scale experiments to be conducted even by underequipped institutions. We discuss the motivation, design, and implementation of the Spamulator, and our experience with it in the spam and spyware class.

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