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Category: SDN

Easiest way to install OpenVswitch and Mininet on Ubuntu 12.04

I’ve been struggling trying to set up the OVS 2.0 with Mininet 2.2 on Ubuntu 12.04.

Apparently the installation script from Mininet is not fully working on Ubuntu 12.04.

What did I do to fix it?

The easiest way to install it is to use the Mininet installation script and then do a small fix.

I did this exactly to install:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git
git clone git://github.com/mininet/mininet
cd mininet
git checkout -b 2.2.0 2.2.0
util/install.sh -nf
util/install.sh -V 2.3.0

After this you will some weird errors. It should look like this:

Setting up openvswitch-switch (2.3.0-1) ...
 * Inserting openvswitch module
 * /etc/openvswitch/conf.db does not exist
 * Creating empty database /etc/openvswitch/conf.db
 * Starting ovsdb-server
2015-01-02T00:57:50Z|00002|stream_unix|WARN|/usr/local/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock: connection failed (No such file or directory)
2015-01-02T00:57:50Z|00003|reconnect|WARN|unix:/usr/local/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock: connection attempt failed (No such file or directory)
2015-01-02T00:57:51Z|00004|stream_unix|WARN|/usr/local/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock: connection failed (No such file or directory)

You should interrupt the script now with ctrl+C. Next do this:

cd ~/openvswitch/openvswitch-2.3.0/
sudo -s
ovsdb-tool create /usr/local/etc/openvswitch/conf.db vswitchd/vswitch.ovsschema
ovsdb-server -v --remote=punix:/usr/local/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock \
--remote=db:Open_vSwitch,Open_vSwitch,manager_options \
--private-key=db:Open_vSwitch,SSL,private_key \
--certificate=db:Open_vSwitch,SSL,certificate \
--pidfile --detach --log-file
ovs-vsctl --no-wait init
ovs-vswitchd --pidfile --detach
ovs-vsctl show

This partially solves the problem. Let’s go ahead and test it: sudo mn --test pingall.

If you reboot you are going to have the same error. What you can do is to run this everytime you reboot:

cd ~/openvswitch/openvswitch-2.3.0/
sudo -s
ovsdb-tool convert /usr/local/etc/openvswitch/conf.db vswitchd/vswitch.ovsschema
ovsdb-server -v --remote=punix:/usr/local/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock \
--remote=db:Open_vSwitch,Open_vSwitch,manager_options \
--private-key=db:Open_vSwitch,SSL,private_key \
--certificate=db:Open_vSwitch,SSL,certificate \
--pidfile --detach --log-file
ovs-vsctl --no-wait init
ovs-vswitchd --pidfile --detach
ovs-vsctl show

If you find a best solution or this does not work for you, please report me your issue. I will do my best to help you!

Regards,

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Setting up OpenVswitch and Mininet 2.2 on Ubuntu 14.04

In this tutorial I’ll briefly describe how to perform a standard installation of Mininet. This tutorial should work on Ubuntu 14.04.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git
git clone git://github.com/mininet/mininet
cd mininet
git checkout -b 2.2.0 2.2.0
util/install.sh -nfv

Do install.sh -h to explore additional options.

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Topology Discovery with Ryu

How can be openflow used to do topology discovery? Why would you want to do that?

You might be interest in doing topology discovery on your topology for multiple reasons such as applying custom forwarding strategies from a centralized global view of the network. You may want something simple like running spanning tree or you may want to run shortest path forwarding. OpenFlow gives you the power to do that or even harder things.

SDN controllers can capitalize on the centralized view of the network and perform all kinds of operations such as pre-computing and installing backup paths.*

In this tutorial I’ll briefly describe the topology discovery module of the RYU controller and guide you through the development of a very naive application to print the information of the network.

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Shortest Path forwarding with Openflow on RYU

So, Openflow doesn’t do shortest path forwarding? How can a network architecture NOT do shortest path forwarding? SDN is BS.

Yes, Openflow doesn’t do shortest path forwarding by itself, in fact, it doesn’t do anything by itself. Openflow is a tool that allows you to programmatically control your network devices.

However, it gives you the power to do it. In this post I’ll guide you through the development of a shortest-path forwarding network application using the RYU Controller and Openflow. Hopefully I’ll post a few thoughts on different forwarding schemes and Openflow.

For this tutorial, I’m assuming you are familiar with Openflow, Mininet and RYU. If you are not, go ahead and check this other posts. I’m using RYU, which is an OpenFlow Controller written in python with support to OpenFlow 1.3. To know more about it visit their website

To install RYU you can easily do pip install ryu and BOOM! If it doesn’t work you can try using the Mininet installation script with the -y option.

The network application will be organized in three blocks:

  • topology discovery
  • network view construction
  • forwarding

For the topology discovery we’ll use a RYU module/library called topology. For network view construction we’ll use an awesome python graph library called networkX. For forwarding we’ll use OpenFlow.

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Troubleshooting Ofdissector: a Wireshark plugin to analyze OpenFlow 1.3

In this last post, I explained how to install the last version of the OFDissector.

I still had one other problem after installing it.

Whenever I run wireshark as a root user I had this following error:

Lua: Error during loading: [string "/usr/share/wireshark/init.lua"]:45: dofile has been disabled

What happens is that whenever something tries to run LUA code with root permissions, that script is blocked.

What you gotta do to fix that: you have to not run wireshark with root permissions. To do that you might want to still be able to capture traffic from all interfaces, then you should do what is described here:

sudo setcap 'CAP_NET_RAW+eip CAP_NET_ADMIN+eip' /usr/bin/dumpcap

After that you should be able to run Wireshark without any problems.

Thanks

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OpenDaylight Tutorial – Basic Setup

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?

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OpenDaylight Tutorial – Installation

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.

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

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.

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Easiest way to install RouteFlow.

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

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