Make your own L2 Firewall! | There is IT in Helsinki

2013-07-17
it
#coursera, #firewall, #learning, #linux, #pox, #python, #sdn, #software, #defined, #networking, #studying

Is what I did this week during the SDN Course on Coursera :)

Within mininet or with a real OpenFlow capable switch, you can point the switch to use a controller. The controller would figure out all the smart stuff and the switch only does what the controller tells it to do.

POX is one of these APIs that you can use to create controllers, it's good for learning about controllers as it's not so low level as it's sibling NOX, which is in C++. There are switches in JAVA too (Floodlight) and many more.

With POX there are some example switches, for example a basic L2 learning switch. It remembers (among quite a few other things) MAC addresses for hosts and remembers in which ports the MAC addresses can be found. With a simple ping: After L2 broadcast is done to find the MAC of the recipient, the controllers install the MAC_source+port and MAC_destination+port as flows on the switches.

What we did this week was to right after the switch is executed, run some extra code that parses a .csv file for MAC address pairs that are not allowed to talk and add these pairs into the flow table.

Pretty cool I think :)