[ipv6-hackathon] Projet proposal: Rapidly deploying an IPv6 testing platform for education

Hi Samer, all,

I love the teaching angle of this project and it's quite similar to an idea
I came up with for a previous hack. This got me thinking that maybe we can
create some modules that would be used by both at the hackathon.

The idea I'm talking about is called Pocket Internet (
https://github.com/inognet/pocketinternet) and what it aims to do is bring
up an infinitely scalable topology that interconnects small pods (ISPs)
into an organically grown network (the Internet). Each pod design would be
based on a blueprint inspired from real life SPs and be as lightweight as
possible while still allowing for enough policy/complexity to be built in.
The goal of it is to provide labs for teaching BGP and Automation tools,
but it could also be a test-bed for new BGP features or anycast type
applications.

I didn't propose this idea for this hackathon because I thought it was more
focused on BGP and routing (both v4 and v6 of course) than on IPv6 itself,
but your project description actually opened my eyes: the Internet is not
only about routing, at a minimum the pocket would need some clients + DNS
and Web servers (e.g. simple websites with CDN content)! And being able to
also simulate some delay/loss in transit would be great for showcasing what
happens in browsers with dual-stack connectivity for example.

My initial experiments have been with Docker containers running BIRD and a
predefined layout... you mentioned Mininet and it may be just the thing for
interconnecting them and simulating traffic conditions (or perhaps
https://github.com/thombashi/tcconfig). After a bit of searching it seems
there's a fork called https://containernet.github.io/ that allows Docker
containers to run inside mininet, which would be an interesting way to
deploy various services in addition to routing: DNS, WWW.

The project would need some way to visualize the topology as it
grows/shrinks - one of the ideas was that by using templated pods you could
scale it to any number of participants (students or trainees) or complexity
in a dynamic way as long as you had the resources to run additional
containers (or money in the case of IaaS :) ).

I'll stop here for now, would love to hear everyone's thoughts + is it
interesting, what could we achieve in the two days of frantic coding we
have ahead of us etc. ?

Cheers,
Cristian


On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 1:27 PM, Samer Lahoud <samer.lahoud at usj.edu.lb>
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I would like to propose a project that consists of rapidly deploying an
> IPv6 testing platform that can be used in student labs (or also in
> professional training).
>
> The description below is a first draft, I will be glad to receive any
> comments and modifications if you feel interested in the project outcome.
>
> ====
> In a typical student lab, we would like to analyse the transition from
> IPv4 to IPv6, the coexistence of the two versions, and also the interaction
> with different applications. Let us take for example an IPv4/IPv6 dual
> stack HTTP server, a dual stack DNS server, an IPv4 only HTTP server, and
> an IPv6 only HTTP server. Playing with such servers will enable students to
> understand different challenges related to the transition from IPv4 to
> IPv6. For instance, when I type www.example.com in my browser, what will
> be the formulated DNS queries? When my PC receives two DNS replies, what
> HTTP/TCP connection will it try first? etc.
>
> My proposed idea is to use Mininet to automatically deploy the IPv4 and/or
> IPv6 servers (Mininet http://mininet.org creates a realistic virtual
> network, running real kernel, switch and application code, on a single
> machine). Then, this (virtual) server platform can be bridged with any
> hardware platform (for example student PCs, quagga routers, etc.) to obtain
> a full Lab workbench.
>
> Some additional outcomes of the proposed project can consist of writing a
> basic lab (with questions and answers) to promote the platform, and also
> exploring some SDN functionalities enabled by the use of Mininet.
> ====
>
> If my proposed project is not retained, I will be glad to join efforts in
> designing an automatic tool that computes the AS-path inflation between
> IPv4 and IPv6 paths in the current DFZ routing table or maybe computing for
> each country the percentage of IPv6 AS-paths originating and terminating in
> the country but crossing ASes from other countries.
>
> Best regards,
> Samer Lahoud.
> ----
> Samer Lahoud
> Professeur associé
> Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth
> ESIB - Laboratoire CIMTI
> Tel: (+961) 1 421 339
>
> _______________________________________________
> ipv6-hackathon mailing list
> ipv6-hackathon at ripe.net
> https://lists.ripe.net/mailman/listinfo/ipv6-hackathon
>



-- 
Cristian Sirbu
www.trueneutral.eu
twitter.com/cmsirbu

PGP 2C94 0C28 08F2 378F 45C7  4E11 8AFA 4E29 710D 0D66
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ipv6-hackathon/attachments/20171030/0bd3703a/attachment.html>