Made Significant Progress

After being at Boy Scout Camp (BDSR in Colorado), I have made significant progress the last few days.  I have SNAT working on the VM environment in the Perl (no Java required).  I had to copy a large number of libraries in order to get Apache, MySQL and Perl working correctly.  For Perl and MySQL I ended up recompiling from source with a destination of the SNAT application installation directory.  Apache, I started with the idea of doing a chroot jail, but with the lack of 'mknod' support (I get permission denied messages), chroot is not going to work correctly.

Tomorrow I have my first practice demo for the application.  I am excited as I am almost finished with the demo portion of the application.  I have the following minor things left to do:

• Cron


• Interface polling


• SSH support


• Interface clean up


• Security page / enhancements (cookies or similar)

Porting the Application

In order to get SNAT to operate, I have to get a number of services installed in addition to SNAT.  I apparently mis-read the documentation and somehow got the impression that the AXP came with Apache and MySQL already installed.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.

I am currently getting a Fedora Core 4 development environment installed so I can get the Apache and MySQL servers installed.  Then, I will need to get the Java and Perl environments installed as well.

Thus far, I have determined the appropriate steps to get the services installed, I just need to get the development environment reconfigured to support the FC4 versus the FC11 to make sure I don't need to install too many additional dependencies.

Most likely, this will end in a horrible dependency loop (between Apache, MySQL, Java and Perl).  Making this process much more difficult than it really should be.  To get around this, I will install everything into a new directory structure and change the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to utilize the SNAT application libraries first and then search the remaining system LD_LIBRARY_PATH next.

I may end up going back to the Perl version of the telnet/SSH/SNMP/Graphing processes as I have to get all of these libraries installed anyway.  Additionally, the version of Java installed is the IBM Java ME which will not run the version of the application which I currently developed under.  This means I need to install a whole new version of Java as well.  I will make the determination based on how easy it is to install the updated versions of the applications and libraries.

Great Week at Cisco Live!

Had a great week at Cisco Live! 2009 in San Francisco.  I attended sessions on IPv6 (service provider and enterprise sessions), network security (Multicast, IPv6 and Virtualization) and several sessions on the next generation datacenter vision from Cisco (hint: everything is virtualized).

Some of the interesting things in Cisco's vision of the next data center is that everything is virtualized.  This goes in both the direction of making multiple hardware components look like a single hardware component (such as the VSS on the Catalyst 6500 platform) or in the other directionwith a single component acting as multiple virtual components (such as the case with VDC on the Nexus or VMware on servers).

IPv6 seems to be missing some major items for full deployment (from the service provider standpoint).  For example, there is no MPLS support (for the service provider transporting MPLS traffic only over IPv6).

I did not make any real progress on the SNAT tool, because of all of the sessions at Cisco Live.  But, I will be making some more progress in the coming days.