Where is the debugger for my software-defined network?

ABSTRACT

The behavior of a Software-Defined Network is controlled by programs, which like all software, will have bugs - but this programmatic control also enables new ways to debug networks. This paper introduces ndb, a prototype network debugger inspired by gdb, which implements two primitives useful for debugging an SDN: breakpoints and packet backtraces. We show how ndb modifies forwarding state and logs packet digests to rebuild the sequence of events leading to an errant packet, providing SDN programmers and operators with a valuable tool for tracking down the root cause of a bug.

References

1. M. Canini, D. Venzano, P. Peresini, D. Kostic, and J. Rexford. A nice way to test openflow applications. In NSDI. USENIX, 2012.
2. M. Dobrescu, N. Egi, K. Argyraki, B. Chun, K. Fall, G. Iannaccone, A. Knies, M. Manesh, and S. Ratnasamy. Routebricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers. In ACM SOSP, volume 9. Citeseer, 2009.
3. N. G. Duffield and M. Grossglauser. Trajectory sampling for direct traffic observation. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., 2001.
4. N. Foster, R. Harrison, M. Freedman, C. Monsanto, J. Rexford, A. Story, and D. Walker. Frenetic: A network programming language. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 46(9):279--291, 2011.
5. N. Handigol and others. Aster* x: Load-balancing web traffic over wide-area networks. GENI Engineering Conf. 9, 2010.
6. P. Kazemian, G. Varghese, and N. McKeown. Header space analysis: Static checking for networks. In NSDI. USENIX, 2012.
7. B. Lantz, B. Heller, and N. McKeown. A network in a laptop: Rapid prototyping for software-defined networks. In HotNets. ACM, 2010.
8. LBNL/ICSI Enterprise Tracing Project. http://www.icir.org/enterprise-tracing/download.html.
9. H. Mai, A. Khurshid, R. Agarwal, M. Caesar, P. B. Godfrey, and S. T. King. Debugging the data plane with anteater. SIGCOMM '11, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.
10. The openflow switch. http://www.openflow.org.
11. {ovs-discuss} setting mod-dl-dst in action field of openflow corrupts src mac address. http://openvswitch.org/pipermail/discuss/2012-March/006625.html.
12. M. Reitblatt, N. Foster, J. Rexford, and D. Walker. Consistent updates for software-defined networks: change you can believe in! In HotNets. ACM, 2011.
13. S. Savage, D. Wetherall, A. Karlin, and T. Anderson. Practical network support for ip traceback. SIGCOMM '00, New York, NY, USA, 2000. ACM.
14. A. C. Snoeren, C. Partridge, L. A. Sanchez, C. E. Jones, F. Tchakountio, S. T. Kent, and W. T. Strayer. Hash-based ip traceback. SIGCOMM '01, New York, NY, USA, 2001. ACM.
15. A. Tootoonchian and Y. Ganjali. Hyperflow: A distributed control plane for openflow. In Workshop on Research on enterprise networking (INM/WREN). USENIX Association, 2010.
16. A. Voellmy and P. Hudak. Nettle: Functional reactive programming of openflow networks. PADL, Jan, 2011.
17. A. Wundsam, D. Levin, S. Seetharaman, and A. Feldmann. Ofrewind: enabling record and replay troubleshooting for networks. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2011.

Index Terms

• Networks

  • Network services

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software verification and validation

      • Software defect analysis

        • Software testing and debugging