Subject: [Supa] Requirements from Cernet

From: 李福亮 <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 11:14:33 +0800 (GMT+08:00)

Hello, everyone,

Glad to see your efforts here. I’m in the Network Operations and Management Lab of Tsinghua University, so I can get close to the real network, including CERNET, and CERNET2. The Internet is becoming extremely complex and the network devices have been supporting more functions and providing various services, which result in much more misconfigurations. Therefore, configuration management has drawn many researchers’ interest and attention. One of my research topics is configuration management, which is put forward due to the management requirements of the operational networks, especially the traffic hub of DCs. These universal requirements are summarized as follows.

1. Tasks like rate limiting, launching routes for new customers, etc., are configured frequently during our daily network operation . These repetitive tasks lay burden on us and increase the possibility of misconfigurations.

2. Automated configuration. For the fixed and repetitive configuration tasks, we can construct configuration templates by correlating each task to a certain set of commands in configuration files and then provide automated configuration, which will improve configuration efficiency and reduce misconfigurations .

3. Devices of the network may be produced by different manufacturers, which differ in configuration language. In addition, configuration tasks will change accompanying with the dynamics of the network. In summary, network configuration is diverse, so it is difficult to provide automated configuration for all kinds of devices and tasks. In addition, configuration commands in the configuration files are not isolated, but dependent on each other when they are working in the operational network. So we should also take notice of the configuration dependency.

4. Configuration recommendation. Duo to the network dynamics and configuration dependency, automated configuration is not suitable for any scenarios. Therefore, we propose configuration recommendation. (1) Configuration template recommendation: retrieving the key words of the configuration task and then finding out the same configuration tasks that have been configured across the whole network. The results will be referred to configure new tasks, which will enhance the configuration efficiency. (2) Configuration dependence recommendation: retrieving the dependent configurations for configuration commands before they are submitted. We will take note of these dependences, which will decrease the possibility of misconfigurations .

Regards,

Fuliang Li

Cernet

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Fuliang Li (Dallen), Ph.D.

Department of Computer Science and Technology

Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

[email-masked]

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Fuliang_Li