Mininet and Open vSwitch on CentOS 7

The following are the steps I took to get Mininet running in CentOS 7.  I ran into many issues trying to get OVS installed and running.  There was a conflict between the OVS script tools starting OVSDB and SELinux.  I had to set SELinux to Passive to work around it.  So depending on what system you are running this on,  be advised of the following steps and what system level settings I changed for security.  I assume most of these will be corrected once OVS officially supports CentOS/RHEL 7.

Installing Mininet on CentOS7
– I needed VM with 2GB memory to get OS installed.
– I used CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-livecd.iso to install the VM. I’m not going to outline steps for installing CentOS.
– I created a local user called mininet and gave it sudo access and ran the remainder as that user.
– Install SSHD
sudo yum -y install openssh-server
sudo chkconfig sshd on
sudo service sshd start

– Disable SELinux to get OVSDB to stasrt
sudo setenforce Permissive

– Modify sudoers secure_path to add /usr/local/bin so the ‘controller’ which be found.
Defaults    secure_path = /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

– Install GIT
sudo yum -y install git

– Get Mininet.
git clone git://github.com/mininet/mininet.git
– Update installer mininet/util/install.sh.
***ADD the following before the line ‘test -e /etc/fedora-release && DIST=”Fedora”‘. Somewhere around line 47.  May differ.
test -e /etc/centos-release && DIST="CentOS"
if [ "$DIST" = "CentOS" ]; then
    install='sudo yum -y install'
    remove='sudo yum -y erase'
    pkginst='sudo rpm -ivh'
    # Prereqs for this script
    if ! which lsb_release &> /dev/null; then
        $install redhat-lsb-core
    fi
fi
***EDIT
if ! echo $DIST | egrep 'Ubuntu|Debian|Fedora|CentOS'; then
    echo "Install.sh currently only supports Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora."
    exit 1
fi

– Install Mininet and OpenFlow reference.  Not OVS.
mininet/util/install.sh -nf

– Build and Install OVS
sudo yum -y install gcc make python-devel openssl-devel kernel-devel graphviz \
kernel-debug-devel autoconf automake rpm-build redhat-rpm-config \
libtool wget

mkdir -p /home/mininet/rpmbuild/SOURCES/
cd /home/mininet/rpmbuild/SOURCES/
wget http://openvswitch.org/releases/openvswitch-2.3.0.tar.gz
tar zxvf openvswitch-2.3.0.tar.gz
cd openvswitch-2.3.0
rpmbuild -bb --without check rhel/openvswitch.spec
sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps /home/mininet/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/openvswitch*.rpm

– Start OVS
sudo /etc/init.d/openvswitch start

– Check working
[mininet@localhost ~]$ sudo ovs-vsctl show
76ed3664-6b6b-4325-85c1-c9a2bf735e30
    ovs_version: "2.3.0"

– Test out Mininet
[mininet@localhost ~]$ sudo mn --test pingall
*** Creating network
*** Adding controller
*** Adding hosts:
h1 h2
*** Adding switches:
s1
*** Adding links:
(h1, s1) (h2, s1)
*** Configuring hosts
h1 h2
*** Starting controller
*** Starting 1 switches
s1
*** Waiting for switches to connect
s1
*** Ping: testing ping reachability
h1 -> h2
h2 -> h1
*** Results: 0% dropped (2/2 received)
*** Stopping 1 controllers
c0
*** Stopping 1 switches
s1 ..
*** Stopping 2 hosts
h1 h2
*** Done
completed in 5.397 seconds

So it seems to work.  But there are a few things to note.

1. The kernel datapath is not installed.  This is totally userspace.  I could not get the kernel module to compile.  Wait until official support of RHEL7.
2. The above is the extent of the testing I did.  There may be other issues that crop up.

Hope this helps anyone that uses CentOS or RHEL 7 with Mininet.

This post ‘Mininet and OVS on CentOS 7’ first appeared on https://techandtrains.com/.