Cejka, Tomas, Ing.
Krejci, Radek, RNDr.
7.5.2012
In order to help to network administrators and operators to diagnose their network links, we designed and implemented a COMET system. The name COMET stands for COMbo Ethernet Tester. The COMET tester is useful for testing 10 GE and it is ready to be used for faster challenging technologies like 40 GE and 100 GE interfaces. These new interfaces are described in IEEE 802.3ba standard, which was ratified in June 2010. The standard includes two link rates — 40 and 100 Gb/s.
The idea of realization of the new Ethernet testing device came from the Liberouter community of the CESNET, z.s.p.o. organization. COMET is one of projects using the programmable hardware that brings hardware acceleration for network applications.
COMET software is divided into COMET library libcomet and applications that uses this library. There are console applications comstat(1), pcap2sze(1) and pcapedit(1) and CGI application comet.cgi. In addition to these applications, there is an implementation of Netopeer Device module that brings support of NETCONF protocol.
Documentation for listed utilities can be found in manual pages that are included in installation packages.
Can be used for communication with the COMBOv2 card via MI32/MDIO/I2C.
It can read or write values from/into the card according to XML configuration file
Can be used for stored network traffic retransmission from the COMBOv2 card using precise time-stamps.
This utility was used for simple manipulation with PCAP files.
The aim of this document is a description of my work on the software part of the COMET Ethernet tester. COMET is the device based on Programmable hardware — COMBO card. During the work on the project, I created a control software for the tester. The software includes the libcomet library and software utilities that use libcomet. The COMET software contains the command line tools, the CGI application that creates simple graphical user interface and the plug-in for Netopeer configuration system. The plug-in brings the support of the NETCONF configuration protocol for COMET.
COMET, Ethernet tester, NETCONF, COMBO card, control software, Liberouter, CESNET
System COMET was tested on a development server of CESNET, z.s.p.o. with GNU/Linux Scientific Linux release 6.2 (Carbon).
After RPM packages download, installation can be done with yum(1) package manager as following example:
yum install ./*.rpmMaster's thesis text, mentioned on this page, contains a section about installation of the system.
note: for successful running of the system, the server should contain COMBOv2 card developed by CESNET, z.s.p.o..
All source codes can be freely shared under BSD licence.