March 2014 – Net Automated

OpenDaylight Tutorial – Basic Setup

Published by castroflaviojr on March 23, 2014

In this tutorial we will go through basic setup of the OpenDaylight Controller (ODL).

I am supposing that you have already installed the latest version of ODL. If not I suggest you to simply deploy a VM with everything you need.

First, start the controller.

sudo-s
cd controller-sp/opendaylight/
bash run.sh -start

Then, be patient.

Initialization was very slow (10 to 15 min) and buggy for me, you can check if everything is fine by doing this:

bash run.sh -status

You should get an output like this:

Controller with PID: 2363 -- Running!

If you get anything different like:

Doesn't seem any Controller daemon is currently running, at least no PID file has been found

Then you should try to wait few minutes then check it again. If the problem persists you should stop the controller then try to start it again. If it persists again, try rebooting the system.

bash run.sh -stop
Controller with PID: 2363 -- Stopped!

After the controller is running simply create a Mininet topology for it with:

sudo mn --controller=remote,ip=127.0.0.1 --topo tree,2

After that try to access the OpenDayLight Web Interface by accessing http:// [ODL_IP_ADDRESS]:8080.

Then go back to mininet and ping two hosts then refresh ODL again.

Pretty interesting huh?

2 Comments

OpenDaylight Tutorial – Installation

Published by castroflaviojr on March 22, 2014

The first official release of OpenDaylight, HYDROGEN, is available for download at their website since February 4, 2014. It is a promise among the SDN controllers. It is an Open source project, and a lot of huge colaborators are part of it, like Cisco and Juniper.

Cisco have already brought to the market a comercial version of it. The Cisco XNC 1.5 has a few more features than ODL such as interface with Cisco OnePK and it is part of the Cisco ONE (Open Network Environment).

Still, the ODL controller is a big name and in this series of tutorial posts we will go through installation and configuration of basic functionalities.

Installation

If you just want to be introduced to the ODL the easiest way to install it is not actualy to installing it. Instead just download this VM with all the required code you need to run it.

You can easily deploy this VM on Virtualbox, or VMware Workstation. Source: HERE.

Ps.: If you want to actually install it, you can follow this tutorial. In the future I will post a tutorial with ODL installation for developing purpose.

Configuration comes next.

Ofdissector: A way to analyze OpenFlow packets in Wireshark at Ubuntu 12.04

Published by castroflaviojr on March 19, 2014

As you start messing around in the Software-Defined Networking area you might want to analyze OpenFlow packets in Wireshark. This post is a installation tutorial of ofdissector, a plugin to analyze OpenFlow 1.3 packets in Wireshark.

The guys from CPqD have developed a plugin called ofdissector that is capable of doing that. In this post I am going to report the troubleshooting I had to do to make it work. The main problem was to make Wireshark to be able of analyzing OF 1.3. The original installation guide is linked here.

What worked?

I started by following this tutorial and finally came up with this successful installation script :

cd  $HOME/
git clone git://github.com/mininet/mininet
mininet/util/install.sh -n3f
sudo -s
apt-get install scons
git clone https://github.com/CPqD/ofdissector    
cd ofdissector/src
export WIRESHARK=/usr/include/wireshark
scons install

Troubleshooting:

The first problem I had was not being able to install ofdissector correctly. Adding the sudo -s command made things better I don’t know why exactly. But before I was having the following error:

scons: Reading SConscript files ...
### ERROR: You need to set the WIRESHARK environment variable to the
location of your wireshark include directory.
### ERROR: (such that epan/packet.h is a valid include path)

The seconde problem I had was conflicting installations of different versions of ofdissector. I installed both versions. You can avoid the problem by not installing the oldversion of ofdissector, using the following line of code instead of the wrong one:

##This is Right!!!
mininet/util/install.sh -n3f
##This is WRONG!!
mininet/util/install.sh -n3fxw
## the w option will install the wireshark plugin for OF1.0

Anyway, if you install both and fall into this problem:

 Err Duplicate protocol name "OpenFlow Protocol"! This might be caused by an inappropriate plugin or a development error.

The only thing you have to do is to remove the old openflow plugin and reinstall the new ofdissector by doing this:

sudo -s
rm -f /usr/lib/wireshark/libwireshark1/plugins/openflow.so
cd $HOME/ofdissector/src
export WIRESHARK=/usr/include/wireshark
scons install

That’s it. Feel free to report issues with the installation script.

2 Comments

Easiest way to install RouteFlow.

Published by castroflaviojr on March 19, 2014

So I’ve struggled the whole day to install RouteFlow and I just want to post my results here.

The easiest way to use RouteFlow is to download a pre-built vm from this ftp:
ftp.cpqd.com.br/pub/routeflow/RouteFlow.zip

I tried to build it from source code several times and only succeeded when I created a clean Ubuntu 12.04 VM from scratch. https://github.com/CPqD/RouteFlow

I tried to build the source code on a machine that I used for mininet 2.1, 2.0, and it didn’t work, I guess that the Ubuntu version really makes a difference. But that’s only a guess.

That’s it.

Thanks