Installation

Common Installation Tasks

These tasks are required by all installation methods.

You will need to provide an initial configuration files for FAUCET and Gauge, and create directores for FAUCET and Gauge to log to.

mkdir -p /etc/ryu/faucet
mkdir -p /var/log/ryu/faucet
mkdir -p /var/log/ryu/gauge
$EDITOR /etc/ryu/faucet/faucet.yaml
$EDITOR /etc/ryu/faucet/gauge.yaml

This example faucet.yaml file creates an untagged VLAN between ports 1 and 2 on DP 0x1. See Configuration for more advanced configuration. See Vendor-specific Documentation for how to configure your switch.

vlans:
    100:
        description: "dev VLAN"
dps:
    switch-1:
        dp_id: 0x1
        interfaces:
            1:
                native_vlan: 100
            2:
                native_vlan: 100

This example gauge.yaml file instructs Gauge to poll the switch at 10s intervals and make the results available to Prometheus. See Configuration for more advanced configuration.

faucet_configs:
    - '/etc/ryu/faucet/faucet.yaml'
watchers:
  port_stats:
      dps: ['switch-1']
      type: 'port_stats'
      interval: 10
      db: 'prometheus'
  flow_table:
      dps: ['switch-1']
      type: 'flow_table'
      interval: 10
      db: 'prometheus'
dbs:
  prometheus:
      type: 'prometheus'
      prometheus_port: 9303
      prometheus_addr: ''

Installation with Docker

We provide official automated builds on Docker Hub so that you can easily run Faucet and it’s components in a self-contained environment without installing on the main host system.

See our Docker section for detauls on how to install and start the Faucet and Gauge docker images.

You can check that Faucet and Gauge are running via systemd or via docker:

service faucet status
service gauge status
docker ps

Installation with pip

You can install the latest pip package, or you can install directly from git via pip.

First, install some python dependencies:

apt-get install python3-dev python3-pip
pip3 install setuptools
pip3 install wheel

Then install the latest stable release of faucet from pypi, via pip:

pip3 install faucet

Or, install the latest development code from git, via pip:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/faucetsdn/faucet.git

Starting Faucet Manually

Faucet includes a start up script for starting Faucet and Gauge easily from the command line.

To run Faucet manually:

faucet --verbose

To run Gauge manually:

gauge --verbose

There are a number of options that you can supply the start up script for changing various options such as OpenFlow port and setting up and encrypted control channel. You can find a list of the additional arguments by running:

faucet --help

Starting Faucet With Systemd

Systemd can be used to start Faucet and Gauge at boot automatically:

$EDITOR /etc/systemd/system/faucet.service
$EDITOR /etc/systemd/system/gauge.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable faucet.service
systemctl enable gauge.service
systemctl restart faucet
systemctl restart gauge

/etc/systemd/system/faucet.service should contain:

faucet.service
[Unit]
Description="Faucet OpenFlow switch controller"
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/default/faucet
User=faucet
Group=faucet
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/faucet --ryu-config-file=${FAUCET_RYU_CONF} --ryu-ofp-tcp-listen-port=${FAUCET_LISTEN_PORT}
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

/etc/systemd/system/gauge.service should contain:

gauge.service
[Unit]
Description="Gauge OpenFlow statistics controller"
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/default/gauge
User=faucet
Group=faucet
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/gauge --ryu-config-file=${GAUGE_RYU_CONF} --ryu-ofp-tcp-listen-port=${GAUGE_LISTEN_PORT} --ryu-wsapi-host=${WSAPI_LISTEN_HOST} --ryu-app=ryu.app.ofctl_rest
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Virtual Machine Image

We provide a VM image for running FAUCET for development and learning purposes. The VM comes pre-installed with FAUCET, GAUGE, prometheus and grafana.

Openstack’s diskimage-builder (DIB) is used to build the VM images in many formats (qcow2,tgz,squashfs,vhd,raw).

We provide DIB elements for configuring each component installed in the VM.

Pre-built images are available on our build host https://builder.faucet.nz.

Building the images

If you don’t want to use our pre-built images, you can build them yourself:

  1. Install the latest disk-image-builder
  2. Install a patched vhd-util
  3. Run build-faucet-vm.sh

Security Considerations

This VM is not secure by default, it includes no firewall and has a number of network services listening on all interfaces with weak passwords. It also includes a backdoor user (faucet) with weak credentials.

Services

The VM exposes a number of ports listening on all interfaces by default:

Service Port
SSH 22
Faucet OpenFlow Channel 6653
Gauge OpenFlow Channel 6654
Grafana Web Interface 3000
Prometheus Web Interface 3000

Default Credentials

Service Username Password
VM TTY Console faucet faucet
SSH faucet faucet
Grafana Web Interface admin admin

Post-Install Steps

Grafana comes installed but unconfigured, you will need to login to the grafana web interface at http://VM_IP:3000 and configure a data source and some dashboards.

After logging in with the default credentials shown above, the first step is to add a prometheus data source, please add http://localhost:9090 as your data source. Next step is to configure some dashboards, you can add some we have prepared earlier or create your own.

You will need to supply your own faucet.yaml and gauge.yaml configuration in the VM. There are samples provided at /etc/ryu/faucet/faucet.yaml and /etc/ryu/faucet/gauge.yaml.

Finally you will need to point one of the supported OpenFlow vendors at the controller VM, port 6653 is the Faucet OpenFlow control channel and 6654 is the Gauge OpennFlow control channel for monitoring.