Open Network Optimization Platform / News: Recent posts

Well I finally moved the code to GitHub. Mostly because it allows other users to contribute to the project easier and also because of its more advanced integrations for automated build services.

I did have to re-write the commit's from the old SourceForge usernames to standard email addresses so all previous commits are linked to the same user on GitHub.

You can find the new code repository here:
https://github.com/OpenNOP/opennop

I did some maintenance on the devel branch to remove invalid commit authors. I noticed a few commit's had localhost instead of a valid sf.net user email.

This was confirmed by running this command.

git log | grep "^Author: " | sort | uniq -c

I then replaced those "invalid" commits with a valid one.

~~~~~
git filter-branch --commit-filter '
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME" = "Author Name" ];
then
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Author Name";
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Author Name";
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="username@users.sourceforge.net";
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="username@users.sourceforge.net";
git commit-tree "$@";
else
git commit-tree "$@";
fi' HEAD
~~~~~... read more

Its been a long time but there are finally some new features and enhancements coming to OpenNOP. They are currently working but in a pretty rough state. There are lots of debug messages that need to be removed and some general code cleanup but here is what you will see soon.

1. IPC channel between OpenNOP neighbors. IPC has crude support for
   HMAC authentication and AES encryption.
2. OpenNOP neighbors in a group is called a "Domain".
3. OpenNOP Auto-Detection now uses a process I call NOD (Network
   Optimizer Detection). There is an RFC draft I am working on in the
   code now.
4. OpenNOP Auto-Detection no longer injects IP address of OpenNOP
   appliance into TCP segments. This could be viewed as a data leak and
   so it now uses a sudo-random 32-bit ID. This ID is automatically
   negotiated between OpenNOP neighbors in the IPC negotiation.
5. OpenNOP Auto-Detection requires that the source and destination
   OpenNOP appliances be inside the same Domain and are able to
   communicate with the IPC.... read more

The folks from Center for Open Middleware (COM) of Universidad
Politecnica de Madrid in SPAIN have created a modified version of OpenNOP that includes a dictionary based compression algorithm for deduplication.

https://github.com/centeropenmiddleware/solowan

Developing OpenNOP has been a huge learning experience for me. I have been trying to make sure the code I write for OpenNOP is clean, stable and secure. I recently found Coverity Scan it’s a static code analysis tool to find defects in code. What’s cool is they allow open source projects to use it for free. It’s already helped me locate and fix several bugs that I did not know existed because the code worked even with them.... read more

I am very excited to announce that OpenNOP has reached its first milestone. There will be a new image available shortly based on openSUSE 12.3 and the latest version of OpenNOP.

If you prefer to update your existing appliances to the latest version checkout this article in the wiki. [Update Appliance to 12.3]

Also checkout the tickets to get an idea whats happening for the next release.
https://sourceforge.net/p/opennop/feature-requests/

There are now OpenNOP repositories for Debian, Fedora and openSUSE! If you really don't want to use the provided appliance you can download the packages for your favorite distro from the OBS service.
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=network%3Aopennop

I recommend sticking with the appliance for a single install ready to go package but I know some of you out there will prefer your favorite distro over the appliance or company policy requires you to use a specific distro.... read more

There is a bug in the appliance that prevents it from saving the network configuration after a reboot. You can install yast2 and use it to configure the network interfaces or you can enable manual configuration. Here are steps for both.

To enable yast2 to configure network:

Manually set IP address & static route.
run: ifconfig eth0 172.17.2.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
run: route add -net 0.0.0.0/0 gw 172.17.2.1... read more

I have updated the appliance to use openSuSE 12.1. If you have an install from an older build of the appliance you can update to the latest using this procedure.

Fix minor problems with older releases of appliance.
run: zypper install perl
run: zypper install glibc-locale

Reboot the appliance.
run: reboot

Edit files in /etc/zypp/repo.d/
Replace 11.4 with 12.1 and rename them to say 12.1 rather than 11.4.... read more

The startup script included with the appliance is broken. It was originally written for CentOS and did not transition well to openSUSE. You can manually start the daemon by executing /usr/bin/opennopd.

If anyone is good with bash and willing to help rewrite the init.d script to will work on most Linux distros please let me know. You can contact me via SF.net or use the project forums. Please include your e-mail address.... read more

There is a new appliance ready for download. Unfortunately the old one cannot be upgraded to this release. The old appliance used rPath rBuilder and that service was discontinued. This new one uses Open Build Service (OBS) to build the package and SuseStudio to build the appliance. These services should be around for a long time.

There are also some major bug fixes included since the last appliance was released.

Updated the rpm and appliance to version 0.3.63. To update the appliance run "conary updateall". After the update restart the opennop service.

There is now an OpenNOP appliance image and new rpm available for download. Fixed some major bugs when processing multiple TCP sessions.

A new RPM of the OpenNOP acceleration software is now available. I will try to get the ISO built and uploaded soon.

I am still in the process of re-branding everything to the new project name. I should have another build of the software available as an rpm soon and then installable ISO sometime after that.

Until then you must compile and install the acceleration software manually if you want to test it.

Sorry for the inconvenience.