Downloading and Installing fedd

This section describes how to get a copy of fedd for your testbed and install it. After this you will need to configure it.

Fedd is released under the GENI Public License

Fedd Roles: Experiment Control and Access Control

Fedd can act in two ways:

Experiment controller

The central coordinator for creating and managing a federated experiment

Access Controller

Responsible for negotiating access to local testbed resources. It both maps the user into the local access control and manipulates local resources.

Which role a fedd will act in depends on the configuration of the fedd. A single testbed is likely to run both an access controller to make its resources available to others and an experiment controller to create experiments for its local users. However, there is no requirement that experiment controllers run on testbed infrastructure. A trusted experiment controller may run on a desktop or elsewhere, as long as there are access controllers are willing to grant resources to three-level names that are anchored to its fedid.

Downloading and Installing the tar file

The easiest way to get a copy of fedd installed on your machine is to download the python distutils tar file and install it. The current version is fedd-3.50b.tar.gz​. Older sources are attached to this page.

You will need to have the following python packages installed as well.

• ZSI (version ​2.0 - 2.1a is incompatible)
• M2Crypto (requires ​swig. Most package systems will fetch and install swig as well)
• MySQLdb
• ​libabac and its dependencies.

Versions of M2Crypto before 0.20 will require

• pyasn1

Emulabs generally have MySQLdb installed already. All of the components above also have FreeBSD packages and ports, which can simplify installation. We strongly recommend using the FreeBSD ports system or a packaging system like apt-get or rpms to do these installations when possible. Many of the packages have dependencies that differ slightly on different systems (primarily because different OSes and distros have different software in the base installation).

Finally, if you are creating federated experiments, the graphviz package needs to be installed to generate legacy visualization information. Boss already will have this installed on most Emulab installs. This requirement will disappear in a future release.

Once those packages are installed, the following commands will install fedd:

$ tar xzf -C /tmp fedd-3.50b.tar.gz
$ cd /tmp/fedd-3.50b
$ sudo python ./setup.py install
$ cd 
$ sudo rm -rf /tmp/fedd-3.50b

Your install will include the python package called federation and the following scripts:

/usr/local/bin/access_to_abac.py

converts existing access controller DBs to ABAC.

/usr/local/bin/cert_to_fedid.py

create a self-signed certificate from an existing hierarchical X.509 certificate and key.

/usr/local/bin/confirm_sshkey.py

used in certain static project installs, see configuring

/usr/local/bin/creddy_split.py

Split a combination X.509 certificate and key file into two separate files, useful for working with the ​libabac ​creddy utility

/usr/local/bin/dump_abac_authorizer.py

Debugging tool to display the contents of an ABAC authorizer directory in human-readable format.

/usr/local/bin/exp_access_db.py

application to simplify creating experiment creation databases

/usr/local/bin/fedd.py

fedd itself

/usr/local/bin/fedd_client.py

legacy fedd command line access

/usr/local/bin/fedd_create.py

creates federated experiments

/usr/local/bin/fedd_ftopo.py

returns a general logical to physical mapping

/usr/local/bin/fedd_image.py

generates images of federated topologies

/usr/local/bin/fedd_info.py

provides general information about federated experiments

/usr/local/bin/fedd_multiinfo.py

provides general information about multiple experiments

/usr/local/bin/fedd_multistatus.py

provides summary information of the status of experiments accessible by this user

/usr/local/bin/fedd_new.py

gets a new federated experiment reservation without attaching resources to it

/usr/local/bin/fedd_ns2topdl.py

converts an ns2 representation of an experiment to a topdl one

/usr/local/bin/fedd_spewlog.py

monitor the process of creating an experiment

/usr/local/bin/fedd_terminate.py

ends an experiment

/usr/local/bin/fedd_to_abac.py

converts existing experiment controller DBs to ABAC.

/usr/local/bin/fedid.py

command line tool for getting fedids from X509 certificates

/usr/local/bin/user_to_project.py

used in dynamic project installs, see configuring

These scripts are documented in more detail on the commands page.

DRAGON install

If you are installing a DRAGON access controller, you must also download and install the ​OSCARS configuration software. The DRAGON project provides ​detailed instructions for doing that.

Additional scripts

If you intend to use dynamic project manipulation, you will need to install patched versions of the addpubkey and grantnodetype scripts on boss. These patches extend those commands to revoke access/keys or confirm the presence of access or keys.

The patches are here:

• addpubkey​
• grantnodetype​

To avoid inadvertently interfering with testbed operation, we suggest making modified shadow commands on boss called taddpubkey and tgrantnodetype. Note the leading 't' on the shadow commands. You can do this by doing the following on boss (where the patch files come from wherever you saved them):

$ cd /tmp
$ cp /usr/testbed/sbin/addpubkey .
$ patch < addpubkey.patch
$ sudo mv addpubkey /usr/testbed/sbin/taddpubkey
$ sudo chown root:wheel /usr/testbed/sbin/taddpubkey
$ sudo chmod 4755 /usr/testbed/sbin/taddpubkey

$ cd /tmp
$ cp /usr/testbed/sbin/grantnodetype .
$ patch < grantnodetype.patch
$ sudo mv grantnodetype /usr/testbed/sbin/tgrantnodetype
$ sudo chown root:wheel /usr/testbed/sbin/tgrantnodetype

Note that taddpubkey will be setuid root (just like addpubkey is) and that grantnodetype will not. The permissions need to match those of the original command. They will fail with different ones.

Once the scripts exist, make sure you configure the [allocate] section of the configuration file to use them, e.g.:

[allocate]
addpubkey: /usr/testbed/sbin/taddpubkey
grantnodetype: /usr/testbed/sbin/tgrantnodetype

See the configuration section for more detail.

Federation Kit

The federation kit includes the software that provides the shared environment in the federated experiment. It is described in more detail in the overview of the system. The version we primarily use is available for download​. Download it, put it somewhere that fedd can read it, like /usr/local/etc/fedd and set the fedkit parameter in the [experiment_control] section of the config file to be the pathname of the tar file.

Git access

If you prefer to live more dangerously, you can download a recent tree from the subversion repository on this site and install it. The same packages must be installed as for the tar file version. The commands to check out a local copy from the git repository and install from it are:

$ git clone git://fedd.deterlab.net/fedd
$ cd fedd/fedd
$ make dist
$ cd dist

And from there, install from the tar file in dist, as above. The build scripts expect the wsdl interface descriptions to be in ../wsdl relative to the fedd source directory. SOAP/Web Services interface code is generated from those files. When the tarfile is used, the generated files are included, so the wsdl directory is not delivered.

You can also browse the source on the web.