cloudrouter/cloudrouter

The collaborative open source project focused on developing a powerful, easy to use router designed for the cloud.

John Siegrist

@SiegristJ

@itomkins: The challenge we have right now with CloudRouter is to figure out what direction makes the most sense for software-defined network technologies. At present the base platform is fairly generic, and the CloudRouter repos in their present form would serve just fine as an alternate RPM repo that contains networking-related packages. However, until we hit upon the right direction for the base platform - be it containers or unikernels or VMs, we are opting for greater flexibility. One thing I didn't realize until we were putting together this last v4.0 release was how many good networking software packages are out there that don't integrate nicely into the major Linux distros. While this is a much more limited goal for the project, meeting this need by packaging these components actually provides a useful service to the open source community. If you have any suggestions for packages we should include or ideas about what sort of platform specializations we should be looking at, by all means please raise a JIRA ticket or bring it up as a discussion point here.

Jay Turner

@juliettkilotango

@SiegristJ Thanks for taking up the mantle there!

Ian Tomkins

@itomkins

@SiegristJ Thanks for that detailed answer, it was really difficult to get a feel for what this thing really is from the info on the cloudrouter.org site which presents is as much more of an OTS router distro (comparable with something like vyos for example) that what it really is which is a platform to go build your own stuff on top of with a bunch of useful tools baked in.

Ian Tomkins

@itomkins

i am still working out how i want to tool up for NFV / SDN etc. I guess I am coming at this from a more traditional networking perspective whilst trying to figure out how to adapt stuff to incrementally solve the problems caused by traditional networking systems

btw i still haven't been able to find a list of all the packages provided in CR4 over the top of stock fedora/centos

Jay Turner

@juliettkilotango

@itomkins As John pointed out, one of the key advantages of CloudRouter is that we do pull together lots of disparate SDN-related technologies and make them easily consumable. This significantly lowers the barrier to entry for individuals wishing to play around with the latest and greatest. We wanted to do this on a solid foundation, hence the decision to ship on both Fedora and CentOS.

@itomkins We will get a list posted to the site, but if you check out the package repo, you can see the list . . . https://repo.cloudrouter.org/4/centos/7/x86_64/

@itomkins Likewise for Fedora, https://repo.cloudrouter.org/4/fedora/24/x86_64/

Ian Tomkins

@itomkins

@juliettkilotango ah yes as simple as that thanks

Jay Turner

@juliettkilotango

@itomkins I spent the majority of my career at Red Hat . . . looking at repos has become ingrained in my very being :-)

Ian Tomkins

@itomkins

i bet

btw don't take my comments as overly critical, i think this is really useful stuff, just coming to it as a network engineer rather than as a developer meant that the information provided was a little impenetrable

Jay Turner

@juliettkilotango

@itomkins Not at all! The beauty of an open source project is the ability of the community to assist and direct.

@itomkins I am fully aware that CloudRouter currently falls into the category of "not really knowing what it wants to be when it grows up"

@itomkins That having been said, we do use a stripped-down version of CloudRouter as the software router for https://console.to

Ian Tomkins

@itomkins

i guess what would be really helpful to me would be a feel for how people are building systems around this in a real world situation. I guess I would start with feeling my way in with trying to roll some ansible playbooks to make it do something useful

John Siegrist

@SiegristJ

@itomkins As far as I can tell, there are 4 main streams that fall under the software defined networking banner. The first is network device configuration automation which amounts to using configuration management tools/techniques to setup routers and switches before they are plugged into the network. Second is 'virtual router' technologies, where we run software on commodity PC hardware in place of specialized network devices. Third is network function virtualization, where all the fancy proprietary network black boxes are reduced to software that is able to run on commodity (or at least standardized) hardware. Fourth is programmable traffic engineering, where a programmable 'smart' software-based network controller is able to react to present network conditions and push out routing policy to all devices in a network. Of these, CloudRouter has been most focused on SDN use case #2 - performant virtual routers, but we have a strong interest in all four of these use cases.

Derek Lazzaro

@dlazzaro_twitter

I also tried using the virtual image with VMware Workstation and could not boot. I had to use the ISO to get it boot with Workstation.

Craig Oda

@codetricity

The problem described in this guide has been fixed. I believe the install from vmdk format now works smoothly. https://app.console.to/article/57dc9c32f90f290f6444bbd4/

Craig Oda

@codetricity

regarding usage trends for CloudRouter and open source on white box SDN, Jay Turner, head of the project, is a frequent writer for SDxCentral. Might be worth a look if people are thinking of kicking the tires on CloudRouter. The obvious thing is to deploy CR as something simple like a BGP4 router and then have a flexible SDN router in place ready to be activated when some of the vision for SDN starts knocking at your door. https://www.sdxcentral.com/author/jay-turner/

vans163

@vans163

hello. A question related to fault tolerance. Is there a way to have 2 identical nodes?

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

Hello, I very recently picked up on cloudrouter 4.0. I am trying to get quagga/ospf to work. I found some small issues with the supplied appliances, but still struggle to have vtysh: show int to show the interfaces in up status ... I attempted to follow some recipes on the web, that were not quite cloud router focused. so I worked on selinux and switched to iptables to find a more familiar fw environment ... has anybody got quagga/zebra/ospfd working with V4 ?

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

not many people online it seems ...
in any case I saw
vty_serv_un: could chown socket, Operation not permitted
in the log (that should say "could not chown socket, Operation not permitted"
and I believe can be resolved by adding
/etc/group: quaggavt:!:85:quagga

Scott Haines

@shainesus

hey @Schwichtenberg_twitter stand by. several of us are buried in meetings at the moment. :)

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

@shainesus thanks for the pong, I understand f2f meetings have prio ... :-)

Jay Turner

@juliettkilotango

@Schwichtenberg_twitter I have not seen this personally, but that message is typical of a permissions error (which you seem to have already figured out!)

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

my main struggle is (being a quagga newby) that I do not get the eth0 interface up and I do not see any error message to achieve that
vtysh: show int
quagga-router# show int
Interface eth0 is down
vrf: 0
pseudo interface
Interface lo0 is down
vrf: 0
pseudo interface

Jay Turner

@juliettkilotango

I will spin-up a VM here shortly and see what I can uncover

Scott Haines

@shainesus

thanks @juliettkilotango !

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

I need to run to fetch a train .. I will try to be back (online in ~ 15 min)

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

@juliettkilotango I should have mentioned that I have testwise disabled selinux, moved from firewalld to iptables and even tried the fedora based appliance.

(not using openvswitch nor netns)

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

@juliettkilotango did you find the time to look at your local cloud router V4 instance? we found that we get plenty of
2016/12/06 20:12:51 ZEBRA: FPM: scheduling connect in 5 seconds
2016/12/06 20:12:51 ZEBRA: FPM: beginning state transition connecting -> active. Reason: getsockopt() after async connect failed

that IMHO is attempting to talk to the Forwarding Plane Manager and is seemingly unable to do that .. --- well I am not sure what steps I have to do to either not require a Forwarding Plane Manager or what I have to do to get one configured and running

Jay Turner

@juliettkilotango

@Schwichtenberg_twitter I did not, unfortunately, but have it on the list for today.

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

@juliettkilotango could you help me to understand the minimally required softwarestack please? what performs the role of the FPM? it seems that zebra is failing to talk to it, and seems to be hung up on that

pointer to RTFM would be useful too

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

@juliettkilotango some more data points:
1) I created a 1.1.0 quagga RPM (moving forward) and have interesting new functionality, but the same issue
2) I tried kicking out anything dealing with netlink communication that sounded fancy (dpdk, openvswitch etc) -> same issue
3) I backleveled quagga to 0.99 and voila: it reports the interfaces as up

so one train of though is that VMWare workstation/ESXi VM e1000 device drivers offer too much/false/not enough HW acceleration and GCP (kvm/virtio_net 1.0.0 ) vms have the same issue

cloud router;s quagga version worked on bare metal as well

Joe Cloud

@joe_the_cloud_twitter

What is the default username/password for the vmdk images?

Scott Haines

@shainesus

hi @joe_the_cloud_twitter - you can find the details here: https://cloudrouter.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CPD/Getting+Started

https://cloudrouter.atlassian.net/wiki/questions/1015819/cloud-router-login

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

@juliettkilotango not sure you remember my issue qwith quagga on virtualized systems on GCP and vmware being not able to talk to netlink. As I realized that the CentOS version of quagga099 did not show the netlink issue, I have been working with that version for some time, today I took some time and narrowed the issue down to 0002-zebra-raise-the-privileges-before-calling-socket.patch .. if I remove that, I even get quagga-1.1.0 working

to refresh the error scenario ... with that patch
<code>
show int
Interface eth0 is down
pseudo interface
</code>
without the patch:
<code>
show int
Interface eth0 is up, line protocol is up
Link ups: 1 last: Mon, 16 Jan 2017 05:06:28 -0500
Link downs: 0 last: (never)
vrf: 0
index 2 metric 0 mtu 1500
flags: <UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>
Type: Ethernet
HWaddr: 00:0c:29:0c:a3:f0
inet 192.168.144.49/24 broadcast 192.168.144.255
inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:fe0c:a3f0/64
(...)
</code>

what I like to understand why we had that patch in the first place and what breaks not having it

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

@SiegristJ hello ... could you please have a look into this ^^^ ?

Paul Gampe

@paulgampe

@Schwichtenberg_twitter https://lists.gt.net/quagga/dev/26126 <- this link provides some context as to why this patch has been included in the latest build of Quagga for CloudRouter

Schwichtenberg

@Schwichtenberg_twitter

I observed that this patch had no visible negative effect in non virtualised environments, but I was never able to get it to work in the CentOS flavor of cloud router

thanks @paulgampe for the link .. we probably follow up

YuanLin Zhong

@lr_zyl_twitter

hello ,I want to build bgp with cloudrouter ,but i don't find any documents for bgp conf, how can i get this or someone can help me ?

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