CS352- Project #5: Set up your own IP network Solved

Instructions
Please read these instructions carefully before you begin.

You must work on this project in teams of 2.
You are free to discuss the project on Piazza or through other means with your peers and the instructors. You may refer to the course materials, textbook, and resources on the Internet for a deeper understanding of the topics. However, you cannot lift solutions from other students or from the web including GitHub, Stack Overflow, or other resources. Do not post this project to question-answering services like Chegg. All written and programmed solutions must be your team’s original work. We run sophisticated software to detect plagiarism and carefully monitor student answers. If you are in doubt, please ask us.
You cannot post your solutions to this project on your personal GitHub page or on other web services hosting class materials.
For each question in the project report, please be clear and concise. Vague and rambling answers will receive zero credit.
For the report question on collaboration, please include anyone you discussed the project with, and also any resources you consulted to learn how to solve this project, including URLs of pages visited on the Internet. Please be specific about the aspect of the project that you got help with. You must be thorough and as complete as possible here. It is mandatory to answer this question.
We encourage you to start early and get the bulk of the work for this project done the week(s) before it is due, rather than keeping it until the submission date.
If you have any questions or clarifications on the project, please post them on Piazza or contact the course staff. We are here to help.
Overview
In this project, you will set up a small IP network consisting of hosts and a router. Your network will function with full end-to-end connectivity, and you will experiment with tools like ping and traceroute.

Consider the following network topology:

Here, r1 is an IP router and h1 ... h4 are endpoints. In a safe experimental setting running inside a virtual machine, you will use the ip suite of commands to set up the right IP addresses for all the interfaces, and the right routing table entries for all the routers and endpoints in this network. Welcome to the AS352 network!

Step 1: Set up mininet
To create a safe virtualized environment, we will use a tool called mininet, which uses linux containers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_namespaces) to allow you to create a small network of hosts and routers that can run inside your laptop. (If you’re interested in learning more about mininet, you can read about it from the paper entitled “A network in a laptop: Rapid prototyping for software-defined networks,” found at http://conferences.

sigcomm.org/hotnets/2010/papers/a19-lantz.pdf.)

First, download the standard mininet virtual machine (note, this is a 500+ MByte file).

https://github.com/mininet/mininet/releases/download/2.2.2/mininet-2.

2.2-170321-ubuntu-14.04.4-server-i386.zip

Set up the VM and play around according to the instructions at the link below. We recommend that you use VirtualBox. By the end of this step, you must be able to log into the VM and run basic terminal commands like ls.

http://mininet.org/vm-setup-notes/

Step 2: Play with the topology Python file
Within the virtual machine, run the attached network topology file, AS352.py, which invokes mininet’s Python API to create a network topology with 4 endpoints (hosts) and 1 router. Note the use of sudo while running the program. Note that this program will be unsuccessful on any machine without a viable mininet installation. In particular, you cannot run AS352.py on ilab.

mininet@mininet-vm:˜/project5$ sudo python AS352.py

*** Creating network *** Adding controller *** Adding hosts: h1 h2 h3 h4 r1

*** Adding switches:

*** Adding links:

(h1, r1) (h2, r1) (h3, r1) (h4, r1)

*** Configuring hosts h1 h2 h3 h4 r1

*** Starting controller c0

*** Starting 0 switches

*** Routing Table on Router:

Kernel IP routing table

Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface *** Starting CLI: mininet>

Within the mininet shell, you can do various things to control the hosts and router we just instantiated. One highly convenient aspect of mininet is that the hosts, the router, and the VM all share the same filesystem, so the same files are visible from all hosts and the router. Also, you can run commands, dump outputs into a file, and access it from any host or router or a regular terminal inside the VM. Let’s walk through a few examples of playing around with the mininet topology.

Step 2.1. Run the ls command on host h1.

mininet> h1 ls AS352.py mininet>

Note that the command is prefixed by h1 to indicate to mininet that the command must be run on host h1. You can replace ls by any command which can run on h1, by just typing h1 <command>

where <command> is any command that would run on a regular Linux terminal. You can run

ls on any host or router by changing the prefix of the command:

<host or router name> ls

Step 2.2. Inspect the network topology from within mininet:

mininet> net h1 h1-eth0:r1-eth1 h2 h2-eth0:r1-eth2 h3 h3-eth0:r1-eth3 h4 h4-eth0:r1-eth4 r1 r1-eth1:h1-eth0 r1-eth2:h2-eth0 r1-eth3:h3-eth0 r1-eth4:h4-eth0 c0 mininet>

Note that net is not prefixed by any host or router name. It is a native mininet command.

Step 2.3. You can even run commands on the router! Mininet allows you to treat both endpoints and the router as standard Linux machines, on which you get to run “regular” Linux commands.

Let’s dump the routing table on r1.

mininet> r1 ip route mininet>

By default, there is nothing in the routing table on r1. As you may have guessed, that is one of the things that you will add in this project.

Step 2.4. Mininet can also read a list of commands from a file. Suppose we added the text

h1 ls net r1 ip route

into the file commands.txt. Then, you can use the source mininet command to run all the

commands in sequence, one after another. For example:

mininet> source commands.txt AS352.py commands.txt h1 h1-eth0:r1-eth1 h2 h2-eth0:r1-eth2 h3 h3-eth0:r1-eth3 h4 h4-eth0:r1-eth4

r1 r1-eth1:h1-eth0 r1-eth2:h2-eth0 r1-eth3:h3-eth0 r1-eth4:h4-eth0 c0 mininet>

You can find more examples of mininet commands and usage at http://mininet.org/ walkthrough/#interact-with-hosts-and-switches

Step 3: Set up your network
Now we get to the crux of the project. You need to set up the network interfaces on all hosts and routers, as well as the routing tables, so that end to end IP communication is possible between all hosts and the router interfaces. You will do this in three steps.

Step 3.1. Set up the IP addresses of all interfaces. Please assign the following IP addresses to the corresponding network interface below.

10.0.0.1 h1-eth0

192.168.0.1 h2-eth0 10.0.0.3 h3-eth0

192.168.0.3 h4-eth0

10.0.0.2 r1-eth1

192.168.0.2 r1-eth2 10.0.0.4 r1-eth3

192.168.0.4 r1-eth4

Use the ip addr command to set up the correct IP address for each interface on each machine. You need to set up 8 interface addresses in total. If you need help in using the command, try running ip addr help.

Step 3.2. Set up the default routes for the hosts. The hosts h1 ... h4 are only connected to the rest of the network through one interface. Any external communication must hence use a default route, which moves the packets on the host towards the gateway router, r1. For example, all traffic on host h1 must use the interface/device h1-eth0 to reach any destination (other than itself).

Use the command ip route command to set up all the routes. If you need help understanding the command, try running ip route help. You will set up 4 default routes, one on each endpoint h1 ... h4.

Step 3.3. Set up the routes on the router. We need to configure the router to interconnect the endpoints by matching incoming packets with the correct outgoing network interface. The forwarding table entries on router r1 must look like:

Destination IP address -> Output port ------------------------------------h1 -> r1-eth1 h2 -> r1-eth2 h3 -> r1-eth3 h4 -> r1-eth4

Once again, use the ip route command to set up these routes. You will need to set up 4 routes, one for each destination endpoint.

Step 3.4. Test your network: You’ve done all the hard work. Now check that your network works as intended, using the ping and traceroute commands.

A correctly configured network must be able to execute a successful ping from any host or the router to any valid IP address inside the network.

For example, you can ping h4 from h1, to check reachability:

mininet> h1 ping 192.168.0.3

PING 192.168.0.3 (192.168.0.3) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 192.168.0.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=168 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.0.3: icmp_seq=2 ttl=63 time=0.046 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.0.3: icmp_seq=3 ttl=63 time=0.044 ms

ˆC

--- 192.168.0.3 ping statistics ---

3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2004ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.044/56.315/168.855/79.577 ms mininet>

You can also run traceroute between any two points. For example, a traceroute from h1 to h4 would show something like this:

mininet> h1 traceroute 192.168.0.3 traceroute to 192.168.0.3 (192.168.0.3), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets

0.0.2 (10.0.0.2) 0.018 ms 0.003 ms 0.003 ms
168.0.3 (192.168.0.3) 0.008 ms 0.003 ms 0.004 ms mininet>
Note that there are 2 hops in the traceroute output: the router and the destination of the traceroute, with the IP address of the router interface connected to h1 showing up on the first row.

In case you received an error that the traceroute command isn’t found, install traceroute by running

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install traceroute

How we will test your commands
Once you have set up all the interfaces and routes, put all your commands into a file called commands.txt. Please do not modify AS352.py; your commands must work with the unmodified Python script.

When all the commands in your commands file are run one after another (by typing source commands.txt), subsequent commands should show (1) correct configuration of the interfaces and routes (demonstrated through ip addr or ifconfig and ip route) and (2) full connectivity between all the nodes in the network, such that a ping or traceroute from any endpoint or router to any valid IP address in the network should succeed. We may test connectivity between any or all pairs of endpoints and the router. We will only use ping and traceroute to test connectivity.

You are free to use tools like iperf to do more sophisticated testing. An example of a test using ping might look like:

*** Starting CLI:

mininet> source commands.txt mininet> h1 ping 192.168.0.4

PING 192.168.0.4 (192.168.0.4) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 192.168.0.4: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=1070 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.0.4: icmp_seq=2 ttl=63 time=60.8 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.0.4: icmp_seq=3 ttl=63 time=0.030 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.0.4: icmp_seq=4 ttl=63 time=0.047 ms

ˆC

--- 192.168.0.4 ping statistics ---

4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3010ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.030/282.820/1070.311/455.336 ms, pipe 2 mininet>

Please ensure that mininet does not crash when running your commands.txt.

Notes that may be useful
Mininet has an FAQ/help page at https://github.com/mininet/mininet/wiki/FAQ. There is also a mailing list where you can post (after checking the FAQ and the archives) if you have questions.

To reduce the file size of the disk image, the mininet VM does not come with a pre-installed graphical interface. Hence, using the VM may require you to get comfortable with the Linux terminal/command line. You may find it convenient to use multiple terminals either from the VM console or over SSH using terminal multiplexers like tmux and screen. Alternatively, you may try following the instructions at

https://github.com/mininet/openflow-tutorial/wiki/Set-up-Virtual-Machine#

alternative-run-a-gui-in-the-vm-console-window to install a graphical interface on the mininet VM. We have not tested those instructions our-

selves, however.

You may be surprised to learn that even endpoints have routing tables. When endpoints are connected through multiple network interfaces, a forwarding table on the endpoint determines through which interface a given packet is transmitted.

You will often need to “debug” your network configuration by checking whether packets reached the correct interface with the correct header values. Use a packet sniffer to do this. You may be familiar with wireshark, but it requires a graphical user interface. Instead, we recommend using tcpdump which is a good command-line equivalent. For example, the following command uses ¸tcpdump to sniff the r1-eth2 interface on r1, and dumps the sniffed packets to a file r1-dump.txt.

mininet> r1 tcpdump -v -U -i r1-eth2 -x > r1-dump.txt & mininet> h1 ping 192.168.0.2

PING 192.168.0.2 (192.168.0.2) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 192.168.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=0.021 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.0.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=63 time=0.028 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.0.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=63 time=0.037 ms

ˆC

--- 192.168.0.2 ping statistics ---

3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0\% packet loss, time 1998ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.021/0.028/0.037/0.009 ms mininet>

In a separate window, you can check sample output of the tcpdump:

mininet@mininet-vm:˜/project5$ head r1-dump.txt 18:31:29.326269 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4),

Request who-has 192.168.0.2 tell 192.168.0.1, length 28

0x0000: 0001 0800 0604 0001 feb5 2946 9994 c0a8

0x0010: 0001 0000 0000 0000 c0a8 0002

18:31:29.326278 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4),

Reply 192.168.0.2 is-at 8e:17:54:31:99:e7 (oui Unknown), length 28

0x0000: 0001 0800 0604 0002 8e17 5431 99e7 c0a8

0x0010: 0002 feb5 2946 9994 c0a8 0001

18:31:29.326279 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 63, id 11901, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 84)

10.0.0.2 > 192.168.0.2: ICMP echo request, id 10815, seq 1, length 64

0x0000: 4500 0054 2e7d 4000 3f01 4280 0a00 0002

0x0010: c0a8 0002 0800 d6cb 2a3f 0001 71cc 8f5e mininet@mininet-vm:˜/project5$