INSTALL

Preliminary Mininet Installation/Configuration Notes
---

- This is not (yet) a 'release'; things may be broken.

- To install mininet, with root privileges:

  python setup.py install

  This places the mininet package in /usr/lib/python-2.5/site-packages/,
  so that 'import mininet' will work.
  
- A functional netns binary is required to run mininet, but currently you
  have to compile it and install it yourself from the included .c file:

  to make it: make netns (or cc -o netns netns.c)
  to test it: ./netns /sbin/ifconfig -a 
  to 'install' a link to it, you could do something like:
    sudo ln -s /home/openflow/mininet/netns /usr/local/bin/netns

  Installation is simplest with a distribution that includes a kernel
  which supports the CLONE_NETNS unshare flag by default. Debian 5.0+ does
  (e.g. current debian-testing release); Ubuntu doesn't. If your kernel
  doesn't support it, you will need to build and install a kernel that
  does!

- Mininet should probably be run either on a machine with
  no other important processes, or on a virtual machine
  
- To run the iperf test, you need to install iperf:

    sudo aptitude/yum install iperf

  We assume you already have ping installed. ;-)
  
- You may need other packages to run the examples, e.g.

    sudo aptitude/yum install sshd xterm screen
    
  Consult the appropriate example file for details.
  
- To switch to the most recent OpenFlow 0.8.9 release branch (the most
  recent one with full NOX support):

  git checkout -b release/0.8.9 remotes/origin/release/0.8.9

  If you want to automatically load the kernel modules required
  for OpenFlow, you could add something like the following to
  /etc/rc.local:

    insmod /home/openflow/openflow/datapath/linux-2.6/ofdatapath.ko 
    modprobe tun

- The reference OpenFlow controller (controller(8)) only supports 16
  switches by default! If you wish to run a network with more than 16
  switches, please recompile controller(8) with larger limits, or use a
  different controller such as nox. (At the moment, unfortunately, it's
  not easy to do so without modifying mininet.py. This will be improved
  upon, and an example provided, in the future.)
  
- For scalable configurations, you might need to increase some of your
  kernel limits. For example, you could add something like the following
  to /etc/sysctl.conf (modified as necessary for your desired 
  configuration):

    # OpenFlow: get rid of ipv6
    net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
    net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1

    # Mininet: Increase open file limit
    fs.file-max = 100000

    # Mininet: increase network buffer space
    net.core.wmem_max = 16777216
    net.core.rmem_max = 16777216
    net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 10240 87380 16777216
    net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 10240 87380 16777216
    net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 5000

    # Mininet: increase arp cache size
    net.ipv4.neigh.default.gc_thresh1 = 4096 
    net.ipv4.neigh.default.gc_thresh2 = 8192 
    net.ipv4.neigh.default.gc_thresh3 = 16384

    # Mininet: increase routing table size
    net.ipv4.route.max_size=32768

---