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RARE/freeRtr#

RARE stands for Router for Academia, Research & Education. It is an open source routing platform, used to create a network operating system (NOS) on commodity hardware (a white box switch). RARE uses FreeRtr as a control plane software and is thus often referred to as RARE/freeRtr.

RARE nodes are identified by the rare kind in the topology file.

what is RARE?

RARE/freeRtr has the particularity to run interchangeably different dataplanes such P4 INTEL TOFINO, P4 BMv2, DPDK, XDP, libpcap or UNIX UDP raw sockets. This inherent property allows RARE/freeRtr to run multiple use cases requiring different bandwidth capability.

It can be used as:

More information here and here.

Getting RARE image#

RARE/freeRtr container image is freely available on GitHub Container Registry.

The container image is nightly build of a RARE/freeRtr control plane off the master branch.

Managing RARE/freeRtr nodes#

RARE/freeRtr node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

to connect to a bash shell of a running RARE/freeRtr container: 

docker exec -it <container-name/id> bash

to connect to RARE/freeRtr CLI directly 

telnet <container-name/id>

Info

Default user credentials: rare:rare

Interfaces mapping#

RARE/freeRtr container uses the following mapping for its linux interfaces:

  • eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
  • eth1 - first data interface
  • eth2 - second data interface
  • eth<n> - nth data interface

When containerlab launches RARE/freeRtr node:

  • It will assign IPv4/6 address to the eth0 interface.
  • Data interface eth1, eth2, eth<n> need to be configured with IP addressing manually.

Features and options#

Node configuration#

RARE/freeRtr nodes have a dedicated /run1 directory that is used to persist the configuration of the node which consists of 2 files:

  • rtr-hw.txt also called freeRtr hardware file
  • rtr-sw.txt also called freeRtr software file

User defined config#

It is possible to make RARE/freeRtr nodes to boot up with a user-defined config instead of a default one. In this case you'd have to create rtr-hw.txt and rtr-sw.txt files and bind mount them to the /rtr/run/conf dir:

nodes:
  rtr1:
    kind: rare
    image: ghcr.io/rare-freertr/freertr-containerlab:latest
    binds:
      - rtr-hw.txt:/rtr/run/conf/rtr-hw.txt
      - rtr-sw.txt:/rtr/run/conf/rtr-sw.txt

Saving configuration#

Configuration is saved using write command using RARE/freeRtr CLI. The router configuration will be saved at <lab_dir>/<node_name>/run/

License#

As an open source software, RARE/freeRtr does not require any license file.

Build RARE/freeRtr Container#

RARE/freeRTr container can be built:

git clone https://github.com/rare-freertr/freeRtr-containerlab.git
cd freeRtr-containerlab
docker build --no-cache -t freertr-containerlab:latest .

File mounts#

During lab initialisation, each node will have their run folder created.

In the lab example above:

cd freeRtr-containerlab
$ ls clab-rtr000/rtr1/run/
conf  logs  mrt  ntfw  pcap

$ ls clab-rtr000/rtr2/run/
conf  logs  mrt  ntfw  pcap

root@debian:~/development/testclab/freeRtr-containerlab# tree clab-rtr000/
clab-rtr000/
├── ansible-inventory.yml
├── authorized_keys
├── rtr1
│   └── run
│       ├── conf
│       │   ├── hwdet-all.sh
│       │   ├── hwdet.eth
│       │   ├── hwdet.mac
│       │   ├── hwdet-main.sh
│       │   ├── hwdet.ser
│       │   ├── pcapInt.bin -> /rtr/pcapInt.bin
│       │   ├── rtr-hw.txt
│       │   └── rtr-sw.txt
│       ├── logs
│       │   └── freertr.log
│       ├── mrt
│       ├── ntfw
│       └── pcap
├── rtr2
│   └── run
│       ├── conf
│       │   ├── hwdet-all.sh
│       │   ├── hwdet.eth
│       │   ├── hwdet.mac
│       │   ├── hwdet-main.sh
│       │   ├── hwdet.ser
│       │   ├── pcapInt.bin -> /rtr/pcapInt.bin
│       │   ├── rtr-hw.txt
│       │   └── rtr-sw.txt
│       ├── logs
│       │   └── freertr.log
│       ├── mrt
│       ├── ntfw
│       └── pcap
└── topology-data.json
  • conf folder is where RARE/freeRtr configuration files are located
  • logs folder is where RARE/freeRtr logs files are located (output of show logging)
  • pcap folder is where pcap files are located (packet capture eth1)
  • ntfw folder is where netflow files are stored (future use - not configured currently in default config)
  • mrt folder is where bmp output files are stored (future use - not configured currently in default config)

Lab example#

The following labs feature RARE/freeRtr node:

  1. /run directory is created in the Lab directory for each RARE/freeRtr node. ↩