NOX Installation

Quick Start From Git

For those with all the proper dependencies installed (see below) NOX can be configured and built using standard autoconf procedure:

git clone git://noxrepo.org/noxcore
cd noxcore/
./boot.sh
mkdir build/
cd build/
../configure --with-python=yes
make
make check

If building from the source tarfile, you don’t need to run boot.sh.

By default, NOX builds with C++ STL debugging checks, which can slow down execution speeds by a factor of 10. For a production build, you will want to turn this off:

./configure --with-python=`which python2.5` --enable-ndebug

Once compiled, the nox_core binary will be built in the src/ directory. Note that nox_core must be run from the src/ build directory, and that the build directory must not be moved to a different place in the file system. You can verify that it has built properly by printing out the usage information:

cd src/
./nox_core -h

If you’ve gotten this far, then you’re ready to test your build (Testing your build) or get right to using it (Using NOX).

Not So Quick Start

Dependencies

The NOX team’s internal development environment is standardized around Debian’s Lenny distribution (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLenny). While we test releases on other Linux distributions (Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu), FreeBSD and NetBSD, using Lenny is certain to provide the least hassle.

NOX relies on the following software packages. All are available under Debian as apt packages. Other distributions may require them to be separately installed from source:

• g++ 4.2 or greater
• Boost C++ libraries, v1.34.1 or greater (http://www.boost.org)
• Xerces C++ parser, v2.7.0 or greater (http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c)

For Twisted Python support (highly recommended) the following additional packages are required.

• SWIG v1.3.0 or greater (http://www.swig.org)
• Python2.5 or greater (http://python.org)
• Twisted Python (http://twistedmatrix.com)

The user interface (web management console) requires

• Mako Templates (http://www.makotemplates.org/)
• Simple JSON (http://www.undefined.org/python/)

Warning

Older versions of swig may have incompatibilities with newer gcc/g++ versions. This is known to be a problem with g++4.1 and swig v1.3.29

Boot Options

To only build the core apps, you should boot with:

./boot --apps-core

Buildig with the core apps only reduces compile times by a factor of 4.

Configure Options

The following options are commonly used in NOX configuration. Use ./configure —-help for a full listing:

--with-python=[yes|no|/path/to/python] This will build NOX with support for Twisted Python bindings. Many NOX applications require Twisted support and it provides the simplest API for new developers. We highly recommend building NOX with Twisted for new users.

--enable-ndebug This will turn off debugging (STL debugging in particular) and increase performance significantly. Use this whenever running NOX operationally.

--with-openflow=/path/to/openflow Provide NOX with a path to the OpenFlow source tree. This is only necessary to build against a version of OpenFlow different from that supplied with NOX.

Distribution Specific Installation Notes

Debian Lenny:

Compiling just the core apps requires the following packages:

apt-get install autoconf automake g++ libtool python python-twisted
swig libboost1.35-dev libxerces-c2-dev libssl-dev make

Building all of the applications requires the following additional packages:

apt-get install libsqlite3-dev python-simplejson

To build the documentation you will need to install sphinx:

apt-get install python-sphinx

Fedora Core 9:+

From a standard development install, you can build after installing the following packages:

yum install xerces-c-devel python-twisted libpcap-devel

Gentoo 2008.0-rc1

To compile without twisted python you’ll need the following packages:

- emerge -av boost
- emerge -av xerces-c

OpenSUSE 10.3 :

The boost distribution that comes with OpenSuse is too old. You’ll have to install this from the source:

• boost (http://www.boost.org)

To build NOX (with twisted python) you’ll have to installed the following packages from a base install:

gcc gcc-c++ make libXerces-c-27 libXerces-c-devel
libpcap-devel libopenssl-devel swig sqlite-devel
python-devel python-twisted python-curses

Mandriva One 2008:

NOX compiled on Mandriva with the following packages installed:

libboost-devel boost-1.35.0 libxerces-c-devel
libopenssl0.9.8-devel libsqlite3-devel libpython2.5-devel
python-twisted swig-devel

If the swig and swig-devel packages are not available from the repository, you will have to build swig from source.

Testing your build

You can verify that NOX built correct by running:

make check

From the build directory. Unittests can be run independently through the test application:

cd src
./nox_core tests

As a simple example, if you’ve compiled with Twisted try running packetdump using generated traffic:

cd src/
./nox_core -v -i pgen:10 packetdump

This should print out a description of ten identical packets, and then wait for you to terminate nox_core with ‘Ctrl-c’.