Status report: marionnet or "how to implement a virtual network laboratory in six months and be happy"

ABSTRACT

A virtual network laboratory -allowing to emulate a physical network of computers and network devices such as switches or routers in software- represents a valuable tool for students, and may also be useful to researchers and system administrators. A tool of this kind, particularly if it aims at being usable by inexperienced students, should offer the same opportunities of configuring and experimenting with components as a physical network, providing also an intuitive graphical user interface for dynamically manipulating the network topology and each individualvirtual device. Building such an inherently concurrent system is nontrivial, requiring the integration of many different components written in different languages and a complex control logic. Indeed some projects with similar purposes have been existing for years, and typically use scripting languages such as Python and Bash; by contrast our system, Marionnet, has been implemented using the functional language OCaml in just six man-months and yet providing several important features still missing in more mature projects.We seize the occasion of describing Marionnet to discuss therelevance of the functional style and of advanced type systems for dramatically cutting development time.

REFERENCES

• 1: Harold Abelson , Gerald J. Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996
• 2: ADAMS, D. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Pan Books, London, 1979.
• 3: AT&T LABS. Graphviz - open source graph drawing software. URL: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/.
• 4: Paul Barham , Boris Dragovic , Keir Fraser , Steven Hand , Tim Harris , Alex Ho , Rolf Neugebauer , Ian Pratt , Andrew Warfield, Xen and the art of virtualization, Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 19-22, 2003, Bolton Landing, NY, USA
• 5: BEGNUM, K., ET AL. The MLN Project Home Page. URL: http://mln.sourceforge.net/index.php.
• 6: BELLARD, F. QEMU Open Source Processor Emulator. URL: http://www.qemu.org.
• 7: BLANC, M. The vmumlgui Project Home Page. URL: http://pagesperso.erasme.org/michel/vnumlgui/.
• 8: Matthew Caesar , Donald Caldwell , Nick Feamster , Jennifer Rexford , Aman Shaikh , Jacobus van der Merwe, Design and implementation of a routing control platform, Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, p.15-28, May 02-04, 2005
• 9: CHAILLOUX, E.,MANOURY, P., AND PAGANO, B. Developing Applications with Objective Caml. 2000. Developement d'applications avec Objective Caml, O'Reilly, France.
• 10: Guy Cousineau , Michael Mauny, The functional approach to programming, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1998
• 11: DAVEY, P. The X user: xterm tips and tricks. j-X-RESOURCE 0, 1 (oct 1991), 24--30.
• 12: Renzo Davoli, Teaching operating systems administration with user mode linux, Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, June 28-30, 2004, Leeds, United Kingdom
• 13: Renzo Davoli, VDE: Virtual Distributed Ethernet, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the DEvelopment of NeTworks and COMmunities, p.213-220, February 23-25, 2005 [doi>10.1109/TRIDNT.2005.38]
• 14: DIKE, J. User Mode Linux Community Site. URL: http://usermodelinux.org.
• 15: DIKE, J. User Mode Linux Kernel Home Page. URL: http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net.
• 16: DIKE, J. User Mode Linux. Prentice-Hall, 2006.
• 17: DREPPER, U.,MILLER, P., AND HAIBLE, B. gettext Home Page. URL: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/.
• 18: FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION. GNU Home Page. URL: http://www.gnu.org.
• 19: FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION. GNU General Public License. URL: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html, 2007.
• 20: GALÁN, F., AND DECCIO, C. T. VNUML Language Reference. URL: http://jungla.dit.upm.es/vnuml/doc/1.6/reference/index.html.
• 21: GALÁ;N, F., AND FERNÁNDEZ, D. Virtual Network User Mode Linux. URL: http://jungla.dit.upm.es/vnuml/.
• 22: GARRIGUE, J., FAUQUE, H., FURUSE, J., AND KAGAWA, K. Lablgtk, a Gtk interface for Objective Label. URL: http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/soft/olabl/lablgtk.html.
• 23: ISHIGURO, K., ET AL. Quagga Home Page. URL: http://www.quagga.net.
• 24: KRAP, A. Setting up a virtual network laboratory with User-Mode Linux. Tech. rep., 2004. Masters programme on System and Network Administration, University of Amsterdam. URL: http://www.os3.nl/arjen/snb/asp/asp-report.pdf.
• 25: KRASNYANSKY,M. Universal TUN/TAP device driver. URL: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/, FILE: people/marcelo/linux-2.4/Documentation/networking/tuntap.txt.
• 26: LAWTON, K., ET AL. Bochs Home Page. URL: http://bochs.sourceforge.net.
• 27: LE GALL, S. ocaml-gettext Home Page. URL: http://sylvain.le-gall.net/ocaml-gettext.html.
• 28: LEROY, X., DOLIGEZ, D., GARRIGUE, J., RÉMY, D., AND VOUILLON), J. The Objective Caml system, Documentation and user's manual, release 3.10 ed., 2007. URL: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/.
• 29: LODDO, J.-V., AND SAIU, L. A sample work session with Marionnet. Video. URL: http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~loddo/video.ogg.
• 30: Robin Milner, A proposal for standard ML, Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming, p.184-197, August 06-08, 1984, Austin, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/800055.802035]
• 31: MÜRI, F. uml switch2 Home Page. URL: http://www.uxu.ch/uxu/software/uml switch2.
• 32: NARBEL, P. Programmation fonctionnelle, générique et objet. Une introduction avec le langage OCaml. Vuibert Informatique, 2005.
• 33: NEMESIO, S. C., DE LAS HERAS QUIRÒS, P., BARBERO, E. M. C., AND GONZÀLEZ, J. A. C. Early experiences with NetGUI laboratories.
• 34: OH, S. Gtk+ 2.0 Tree View Tutorial using OCaml - Adaptation of Tim-Philipp Muller tutorial. URL: http://plus.kaist.ac.kr/?shoh/ocaml/lablgtk2/treeview-tutorial/.
• 35: Radia Perlman, An algorithm for distributed computation of a spanningtree in an extended LAN, Proceedings of the ninth symposium on Data communications, p.44-53, September 1985, Whistler Moutain, British Columbia, Canada
• 36: PEYTON JONES, S., ET AL. Report on the programming language haskell 98, Feb. 1999.
• 37: Didier Rémy , Jérôme Vouillon, Objective ML: an effective object-oriented extension to ML, Theory and Practice of Object Systems, v.4 n.1, p.27-50, 1998 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1096-9942(1998)4:1<27::AID-TAPO3>3.0.CO;2-4]
• 38: RIMONDINI, M. Emulation of Computer Networks with Netkit. Tech. rep., 2007. Università degli Studi di Roma Tre. URL: http://dipartimento.dia.uniroma3.it/ FILE: ricerca/rapporti/rt/2007-113.pdf.
• 39: SAIU, L. The epsilon project -- a functional language implementation (MD thesis). URL: http://etd.adm.unipi.it/theses/available/etd-02012007-071542 Software available at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/epsilon, Feb. 14 2007.
• 40: Robert W. Scheifler , Jim Gettys, The X window system, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.5 n.2, p.79-109, April 1986 [doi>10.1145/22949.24053]
• 41: W. Richard Stevens, UNIX network programming, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1990
• 42: TAYLOR, O., ET AL. Gtk+ - GNU toolkit for X windows development. URL: http://www.gtk.org.
• 43: TORVALDS, L. Linux Home Page. URL: http://www.linux.org.
• 44: D. A. Turner, Miranda: a non-strict functional language with polymorphic types, Proc. of a conference on Functional programming languages and computer architecture, p.1-16, January 1985, Nancy, France
• 45: VAN BEERS, M., CHAPLIN, D., ET AL. Glade - A User Interface Designer for GTK+ and GNOME. URL: http://glade.gnome.org.
• 46: VMWARE, INC. VMware Home Page. URL: http://www.vmware.com.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.1 Applicative (Functional) Programming

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.m Miscellaneous

  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming
      D.1.5 Object-oriented Programming
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Polymorphism; Classes and objects; Inheritance

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING
      I.6.3 Applications
      I.6.7 Simulation Support Systems

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.1 Computer Uses in Education
          Subjects: Collaborative learning
      K.3.2 Computer and Information Science Education
          Subjects: Computer science education

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Languages

Keywords:
GUI, OCaml, emulation, static typing, user mode linux, virtual machine