[pox-dev] Offering contribution

[Murphy McCauley]

On Nov 11, 2013, at 5:12 AM, Felician Nemeth <nemethf at tmit.bme.hu> wrote:

> We've recently finished a project in with we heavily relied on POX.  So
> let us thank Murphy and every developer for creating and making
> available this great software.
> 
> Our original plan was to write general purpose POX modules, but later
> we gradually gave up this plan due to time constraints.  Nevertheless, I
> think some features or modules are almost ready for general usage.  If
> there's an interest in some of these modules, we would happily
> clean/rework the code to meet the quality requirements of POX.

I'm really glad you found POX helpful and truly appreciate you making your code available!

There really should be a page on noxrepo.org for people/projects using POX...

> This is what we can offer:
> 
> * a (multicast) DNS responder similar to arp_responder.py

Cool!  I did some stuff with mDNS back in NOX, but off the top of my head, I don't think any ever made it to POX.  I did have a POX-based DNS server/interceptor, though.  I think between my DNS server, your dns_responder, and maybe some refactoring of dns_spy (to make it more useful... maybe something along the lines of arp_helper for DNS, which might have actually been useful to you), we should get some improved DNS functionality into the mainline.

> * POXDesk enhancements:
> 
> ** enhancements to tinytopo/TopoViewer (coloring links according to
>   bandwidth usage, displaying symbolic names instead of DPIDs,
>   listening to host_tracker events.)  This application relies on a
>   simple statistics module from the POX side.
> 
> ** a new MapView application that displays topology/link utilization on
>   OpenStreetMap
> 
> ** another POXDesk application that shows link utilizations as a
>   function of time.

This is all great.  Is there anything from this in specific that you think is a candidate for POX itself, or do you think it's mostly additions to POXDesk?

> * a SIGINT hander in order to remotely shut down POX,

Curious about that one... shouldn't SIGINT already kill it?

> (and a SIGUSR1 hander to fire a RereadConfiguration event)

I wonder if this should be included on the core object?  Different mechanisms (e.g., possibly something from a GUI) could trigger the same event allowing for a platform independent way of reload notification -- even on systems that don't have full signals.  (We'll have to be careful to make sure the signal part gracefully disables on such systems.)

This may dovetail nicely with a goal for dart, which is to be daemon-friendly (misc.pidfile being the first sign of this).

> I've attached a screenshot demonstrating our POXDesk enhancements.  The
> code in its current form is available from here:
> https://github.com/nemethf/sigcomm2013

As I said on the Gephi thread on noxrepo, I think this looks really nice. :)


Please feel free to post a link to the demo site/etc.... and thank you again!

-- Murphy