UNX511- A Network Monitor Project Assignment

Assignment Task

Business Case (Marketing, Project Manager, Senior Executives)

Your job will be to create a network monitor, which monitors the performance of all network interface devices. Monitoring network interfaces can help in debugging system problems as well as in enhancing system performance through a central intelligent networking device.

Currently, on our virtual machine, we have two network interfaces: ens33 and lo. On other machines such as routers, there may be as many as 64 network interfaces, some of them running in the order of 10GBits/second. For routers and other networking equipment, it is crucial to know the performance of each interface and to control each interface, therefore we are going to create a network monitor.

Requirements (Marketing, Project Manager, Project Lead)

1. Our network monitor must be able to monitor any set of network interfaces requested by the user.

2. The statistics for each network interface can be found under Linux's /sys directory, specifically /sys/class/net/. The /sys directory is another directory like /proc and /dev which can be accessed to set or obtain information about the kernel's view of the system.

The statistics to be monitored are:

The operating state - operate

The up-count (number of times the interface has been up) - carrier_up_count

The down-count (number of times the interface has been down) - carrier_down_count

The number of received bytes - rx_bytes

The number of dropped received bytes - rx_dropped

The number of erroneous received bytes - rx_errors

The number of received packets - rx_packets

The number of transmitted bytes - tx_bytes

The number of dropped transmitted bytes - tx_dropped

The number of erroneous transmitted bytes - tx_errors

The number of transmitted packets - tx_packets

3. If an interface goes down (see operstate) then your network monitor must set it back up.

4. Your network monitor must shut down gracefully. That means it must intercept a ctrl-C to shut down the program. The shutdown might include the following - close file connections, deallocate memory, etc...

5. The network monitor will act synchronously. It will not instantly react to any changes in the statistics. Rather, it will poll the statistics every one second.

6. Your network monitor will print out the following once every second for each network interface:

Interface: state: up_count: down_count:

rx_bytes: rx_dropped: rx_errors: rx_packets:

tx_bytes: tx_dropped: tx_errors: tx_packets:

7. For a bonus mark, you can have the statistics displayed on a web page. See week 7 of our lecture notes on setting up the Apache2 web server to work within a Linux environment.

Design (Project Lead, Senior Engineers)

There are two parts to the design - the interface monitor and the network monitor itself. There may be one or more interface monitors but there is only one network monitor.

The Interface Monitor Each interface will have a process dedicated to it. This is called the interface monitor. For instance, if there are three network interfaces on a Linux machine, three instances of the interface monitor process will be running. Each interface monitor will:

• Communicate with the network monitor through a temporary socket file in the /tmp directory.
• Inform the network monitor when it is ready to start monitoring.
• Monitor and print out (or display) the statistics for a given interface as per instructed by the network monitor.
• Report to the network monitor if its interface does down.
• Be able to set an interface link up as per instructed by the network monitor.
• Perform a controlled shutdown if it receives a ctrl-C of if instructed by the network monitor by closing the socket connection to the network monitor then exiting.

The Network Monitor

The network monitor controls all interface monitors running on the system. In a software defined network, it is common to centralize all intelligence in one spot in order to coordinate the operations of all network devices. In our case, intelligence is centralized in the network monitor and the work is done by the interface monitors. The network monitor will:

• Query the user for the number of interfaces and the name of each interface.
• It will create and bind a socket to a temporary socket file in the /tmp directory.
• It will maintain separate socket connections to each interface monitor.
• Once an interface is ready, the network monitor will instruct the interface monitor to monitor and print out the statistics for its interface once every second.
• If the interface monitor indicates that its link is down, the network monitor will instruct the interface monitor to put the link back up.
• On shutdown, the network monitor will intercept the SIGINT interrupt (ctrl-C, kill -2), send a shutdown message to each interface monitor, close all connections, then exit.

Testing and Rework (Junior and Senior Engineers, Product Support)

• You might have to run your network monitor as super user: $ sudo ./networkMonitor
• You may wish to insert a DEBUG flag in your Makefile and in your code to perform debug printf's/cout's while debugging. If you make your code with your debug flag, then code within the following blocks will be executed:
• #ifdef DEBUG
• cout<<"DEBUG:..."
• #endif
• When you are satisfied with your code, you can build your code without the debug flag. 
• When you run your network monitor, compare the statistics that is printed out with the values in the /sys/class/net/ directory.
• When you run your network monitor, compare the statistics that is printed out with those shown with $ ifconfig.
• To test the link down/link up feature of your interface monitor, put a link down (for example lo) with the following command from the command line:
• $ sudo ip link set lo down
• Your interface monitor should indicate that the link is down temporarily, then indicate when it has come back up. Your up_count and down_count should each increment by one as well.
• A correctly running network monitor will look something like:

Questions

1. In a few sentences, describe the general architecture of your entire layout with the network monitor and interface monitors. What does each do? 

2. Could the interface monitor and network monitor all be contained within one process, if so how? 

3. Could the interface monitor and network monitor all be contained within one process, assuming 128 network interfaces running at several Giga-bits per second, which require a polling interval of one millisecond per interface?

4. What is a software-defined network? In doing so, describe the applications layer, the control layer, and the forwarding layer. 

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