Autonet

This is an academic project for the second part of the Design of Networks and Communication Systems course at the University of Trento, taught by Prof. Fabrizio Granelli.

What is Autonet

Autonet is a Visual interface to pre-configure and run a network of VMs/containers and OpenVSwitches with the aim of automating the deployment of network setups. The GUI of the App is done using Tkinter which is Python de-facto standard GUI package.

Our Goal

Our goal is to create an application that allows the user to preconfigure and run a network of VMs. To achieve this we have developed an application that relies on Vagrant to create, configure and run the virtual machines.

5 Steps

Device Configuration
Device Linking
Show structure of the created network
Bash Scripts and VagrantFile creation for running Vagrant
File deletion to clean the default directory

Implementation

Classes are used to store the configuration of each device.

@dataclass
class Host:
    def __init__(self, name, ip, mask, gateway, service):
        self.name = name
        self.ip = ip
        self.mask = mask
        self.gateway = gateway
        self.link = []
        self.service = service

When the user writes the configuration of the selected device, an instance of the class Host is created. The device is then added into device list

def new_host(name, ip, mask, gate, serv):

    h = Host(name, ip, mask, gate, serv)
    print(h.name + " " + h.ip + " " + h.mask + " " + h.gateway + " " + str(h.service))
    trovato = False
    for i in device_list:
        if isinstance(i, Host):
            if name == i.name or ip == i.ip:
                print("esiste già")
                trovato = True
    if not trovato:
        device_list.append(h)

After the creation and the linking process of the devices, there is the possibility to view the structure created.

Name	Ip	Mask	Gateway	Link
Host1	192.168.1.2	255.255.255.0	192.168.1.1	broadcast_Host1_Switch1

Bash Scripts

In order to set the configurations wrote by the user on the VM/s we use the provision function of Vagrant. For each device a bash script is created:

def write_sh():
    for x in device_list:
        if isinstance(x, Host):
            f = open(x.name + ".sh", "w")
            f.write("export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive\n"
                    "sudo apt install -y curl\n"
                    "sudo ip addr add " + x.ip + "/" + str(mask_in_slash(x.mask)) + " dev enp0s8\n"
                    "sudo ip link set enp0s8 up\n"
                    "sudo ip route add default via "+x.gateway+"\n")

VagrantFile

The primary function of the Vagrantfile is to describe the type of machine required for a project, and how to configure and provision these machines.

  config.vm.define "host1" do |host1|
    host1.vm.box = "ubuntu/bionic64"
    host1.vm.hostname = "host1"
    host1.vm.network "private_network", virtualbox__intnet: "broadcast_from_to", auto_config: false	
    host1.vm.provision "shell", path: "host1.sh", run: 'always'
    host1.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
      vb.memory = 1024
    end
  end

Create&Run

When the Create&Run button is pressed:
1. All the bash scripts and the VagrantFile are created
2. Vagrant up and Vagrant status are executed
When the command Vagrant up ends the network is up and running!

Slides

You can find the presentation slides in pdf/slides.pdf.

Team

Made with ☕ & ❤️ by Matteo Greco, Emanuele Boscari, Thomas Dalla Via.

matteogreek / autonet