Getting Started With Frenetic User VM

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Craig Riecke edited this page Jun 14, 2016 · 2 revisions

Installation

Install VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. Use the latest version platform package appropriate for your system.
From http://download.frenetic-lang.org/uservm/frenetic-uservm-current download the latest Frentic User VM – this file is about 1.5 GB and may take about 10 minutes or so to download.
Unzip the file and import the .ova file into VirtualBox. This takes two minutes or so.

Hello SDN World

Start up a terminal window - – two are provided in the VM under Accessories: Byobu Terminal (which integrates nicely with tmux) and LXTerminal (which has graphical tabs). Either one will do.
Start up a Mininet sample network with a switch and 2 hosts:
```
$ sudo mn --topo=single,2 --controller=remote
```
Try pinging the host h2 from the host h1:
```
mininet> h1 ping h2
```
Unfortunately, the ping won't work because you don't have an SDN network program in place! Press CTRL-C to stop the pinging.
Start up another terminal window and start up Frenetic:
```
$ frenetic http-controller --verbosity debug
```
In a third terminal window, start up the example program for the Python repeater:
```
$ python -m frenetic.examples.repeater
```
Now, back in the window running Mininet, the ping should now succeed:
```
mininet> h1 ping h2
```
Congratulations! You now have a working Software Defined Network.

Where to Go From Here

Learn Frenetic programming in Python from the Frenetic Programmers Guide
Try some Python examples, see Example Applications in Python
Learn Frenetic programming in OCaml from the Frenetic Tutorial
Learn the theory behind Frenetic by reading the papers at http://frenetic-lang.org
See examples of production Frenetic-based SDN's at https://github.com/coscin/coscin-app and https://github.com/coscin/gates.