Links & tunnels¶

otto sees the lab’s network twice. Links are the static topology — the edges declared in lab.json (or derived from each host’s management hop) that otto link inspects and impairs. Tunnels are dynamic: host-resident socat chains that otto tunnel builds to carry a service’s traffic across the lab.

Rule of thumb: impair a link when you want to shape a path that already exists; build a tunnel when you need a path that doesn’t.