What is the difference between 'networking operating systems' like ONOS, ONAP, Opendaylight and 'configuration management' platforms like Salt, Ansible, Puppet? More specifically, when would I choose one over the other? I have done some research on all these, and as far as I can tell, the configuration management platforms are, as the name implies, for configuring the network, and the operating system platforms are an actual software defined network that can also configure networks/networking devices plus more.
You're really talking about 3 different things.
OpenDaylight and ONOS are network controller platforms. While ONOS is starting to become feature parity with OpenDaylight, OpenDaylight is more widely deployed (over 1 billion people in production using it) and more supported.
ONAP is a is used to design, create, orchestrate, monitor, and perform life cycle management of open source and commercial VNFs and legacy networks. ONAP uses OpenDaylight MD-SAL at it's core.
I don't have much experience with SALT but it, Ansible and Puppet are flexible DevOps configuration utilities for managing users, services and general automation.
Related
I'm trying to learn network protocol stack(ie. Transport, IP, datalink layer library code implementation) along with linux. I'm confused where to start.
First question is whether these codes come as in-built features of linux kernel/above library layers.
If so why I can see 3rd party protocol stack in some applications (by blunk micro system - developer of protocol stack)
If Linux doesn't have it as core feature, is linux give only placeholders for network part(like just Macros to enable the 3rd party stack ). But an article says it has Net4 networking codebase.
If linux has in-built network features what are the linux modules I need to go through or where to start? Not only in the network perspective, if i'm guided to explore in linux in all aspects (process, memory, drivers) in the "code level", it would be helpful please.
Note: I'm greedy to write my own OS and protocol stack hence trying to understand an existing system.
Thanks in advance!
First question is whether these codes come as in-built features of linux kernel/above library layers.
Linux kernel has network stack up to including layer 4, i.e., TCP and UDP (well, kernel + a set of utilities needed to configure it). I think DNS is in kernel too, but I am not so sure. TLS used to be implemended as a library (OpenSSL and GnuTLS are I think the most common ones), but there seems to be kernel part too now (link.
Note, that some of the TCP functionality is offloaded to the network card (hardware). At high speeds (1Gb+) you won't get full performance without these features.
I am not familiar with all VoIP related protocols, but I think they are libraries, not kernel.
If so why I can see 3rd party protocol stack in some applications (by blunk micro system - developer of protocol stack)
I believe the reason is performance. If you implement a custom stack with a subset of features, it might work better for your applications. Also there are advanced features and protocols that might not be available in the kernel itself.
If Linux doesn't have it as core feature, is linux give only placeholders for network part(like just Macros to enable the 3rd party stack ). But an article says it has Net4 networking codebase.
there is a very large codebase
If linux has in-built network features what are the linux modules I need to go through or where to start? Not only in the network perspective, if i'm guided to explore in linux in all aspects (process, memory, drivers) in the "code level", it would be helpful please.
hmmm, this is a very good question, and I don't think there is an easy answer. In my experience reading the code is the only way to figure this out. However some people tried to fish LWN.net for information.
you could probably start somewhere here: include/net/
First question is whether these codes come as in-built features of linux kernel/above library layers.
If linux has in-built network features what are the linux modules I need to go through or where to start?
You can think of a protocol stack as of a library. Linux kernel has one which runs inside the kernel address space and uses kernel APIs unavailable in user-space: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/net/ipv4
There are multiple in-depth books about Linux kernel networking. Reading one is required for good understanding.
If so why I can see 3rd party protocol stack in some applications (by blunk micro system - developer of protocol stack)
Zero-copy, low-latency and streaming (processing an Ethernet packet in CPU-L1-cache-line-sized chunks while it hasn't been read off the wire in full) networking have been problematic with Linux kernel network stack. For these reasons makers of networking hardware offered their own user-space network stacks, aka kernel bypass.
Linux kernel network stack is getting better these days with MSG_ZEROCOPY and io_uring.
I'm a noob learning openstack. And The resources are all over the place tbh. I came across this image and would like to know one thing,
So, Suppose I have 100TB of storage and 10 server grade processors, and ram of 1TB, do all these resources make up of only one base OS- RED hat enterprise Linux? So, they sell resources to connect all the equipment and connect to install one single OS which can comprehend them all?
And Upon this, we throw an Openstack architecture so clients can use them as needed? Do we need as many NICs or the NICs virtual?
How to scale?
As you say, you just add a server. Install RHEL or another supported Linux distro (it's best to install the same distro and version on all servers), then OpenStack and configure it. The new server will register with the OpenStack controllers and can be used for launching virtual machines immediately.
The process is a bit more involved when you run a cloud with baremetal instances (i.e. you don't launch VMs but provision physical systems), but in principle it's the same.
by definition(at consumer scale-like one laptop) we need a network interface card for one IP
This is incorrect. You can configure multiple IP addresses on a single interface, even on your PC at home, even if that PC runs Windows.
An enterprise cloud requires connecting nodes to several networks. Usually, servers have several physical NICs, bond them together, and use VLANs or other multiplexing technologies to implement the networks. See this blog (five years old, but the principles still apply today, and it's well-written) for a good example of a real-world OpenStack network architecture.
Openstack uses one big special NIC
OpenStack can be deployed in many ways. It is not a shrink-wrapped solution. It can be used on servers with single NICs, bonded NICs, VLANs, normal networks, etc. Your statement is almost correct if you think of a typical deployment and a bond interface as a "big special NIC".
If you are interested to try this out at home, see the OpenStack installation tutorial. You will learn a lot.
I want to know which options exist to provision (configure) multiple VoIP phones from multiple vendors for use with an Asterisk server. I'd like some kind of interface to manage extensions, configuration templates and so on.
Here's what I found so far:
FreePBX has a commercial module called Endpoint Manager which seems to do what I want. However, I don't like the idea of having to run a web server on the same machine (or container) that runs Asterisk. It seems like a bad idea which increases the attack surface of the Asterisk server. I would much rather have an endpoint manager on a separate server (or container) but I can't find any information about running or buying the Endpoint Manager outside of FreePBX.
Phonism advertises a "Cloud based IP phone provisioning and management system. Their service looks promising, but the number of supported phones is lower and I'm not completely sold on requiring the internet connection to configure the phone extensions in an office.
All the other solutions I found are tied to their complete proprietary VoIP solution (3CX, Kerio, etc.) or to a particular VoIP phone vendor.
Is anything else available? Or do people usually use a single VoIP phone vendor and use their own specific configuration method?
Since I can't find any phone provisioning solution which fits my needs, I'm questioning my understanding of Asterisk deployment best practices. Is using a plain Asterisk deployment a good idea or is it too bare in terms of related tooling?
You are thinking about this in a way that is too abstract and generic.
A voip equipment vendor will provide documentation which describes what provisioning protocols are used and how to use them. Then you can find a tool to use which meets that requirement and also suits your environment and skills.
Vendors usually provide proprietary tools to generate provisioning files too.
That said you should be advised that TFTP (trivial file transfer protocol) is a common provisioning method.
If you are using a bare bones asterisk install on linux then setting up your own TFTP server on linux is, well, trivial in comparison.
Running a provisioning server and asterisk server on different boxes is of course possible but you'll need to find or build some integration tools to keep provisioning config and asterisk config in sync (if that's important to you). I can't think of a reason why using two boxes makes this work significantly more difficult though.
I'm currently building a network monitoring system that will notify me if any interface errors or network issues. after building it we would like to be able to test if it works before implementing it to our network, so need a way of simulating network interface errors on a switch or networking device?
I was thinking about cutting ethernet cables or terminating them wrong, but ideally I need soemthing that can create loads of different types of interface errors
any help would be much appreciated
Sean
You could download Nagios which is a powerful, enterprise-class host, service, application, and network monitoring program. Designed to be fast, flexible, and rock-solid stable. Nagios runs on *NIX hosts and can monitor Windows, Linux/Unix/BSD, Netware, and network devices.
you can download other network monitoring systems from sourceforge they have many different network tools written in different languages most of them are open source. you can take notes of their
design and maybe add to the application you building.
if you want to test your application the best thing to do is to tested on real environment, I believe their might be one or two Virtual Lab.
But Ideally I would tested on real interfaces
One of the ways to simulate network failures would be to dynamically change the firewall settings. You can make packets drop, hosts, disappear, etc. This doesn't require any physical damage to anything :)
In the design of the management API of a network element, we often include support for the commonly used CLIs like the CISCO style CLI and Juniper style CLI. But to support those commands, we need to know the breakdown of the commands issued into the sequence of operations on the MIB tables and objects there in.
For example:
A CLI command :
router bgp 4711 neighbor 3.3.3.3
And it's MIB object operations (like in SNMP) would be :
bgpRmEntIndex 4711
bgpPeerLocalAddrType unica
bgpPeerLocalAddr 2.2.2.2
bgpPeerLocalPort 179
bgpPeerRemoteAddrType uni
bgpPeerRemoteAddr 3.3.3.3
bgpPeerRemotePort 179
Is there some resource which can help us understand this breakdown?
In general on the types of devices that you mention, you will find that there is no simple mapping between CLI operations and (SNMP) operations on MIB variables. The CLIs are optimized for "user-friendly" configuration and on-line diagnostics, SNMP is optimized for giving machine-friendly access to "instrumentation", mostly for monitoring. Within large vendors (such as Cisco or Juniper) CLI and SNMP are typically developed by different specialized groups.
For something that is closer to CLIs, but more friendly towards programmatic use (API), have a look at the IETF NETCONF protocol, which provides XML-based RPC read and write access to device configuration (and state). Juniper pioneered this concept through their Junoscript APIs and later helped with defining the IETF standard, so you will find good support there. Cisco has also added NETCONF capabilities to their systems, especially the newer ones such as IOR-XR.
The MIB documents, such as this one,
http://www.icir.org/fenner/mibs/extracted/BGP4-V2-MIB-idr-00.txt