Design%20of%20Web%20Interface%20for%20Advanced%20Content%20Switch

1
Design of Web Interface for Advanced Content
Switch

• Thesis proposal
• by
• Jayant Patil
• Department of Computer Science
• Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs

2
Motivation

• There is a need for user-friendly, efficient,
  secure interface to manage content switches
• IXP1200 based content switch poses following
  additional challenges
• No disk
• Limited memory
• Realtime Embedded OS VxWorks has different
  network library and task management interface

3

• IXP12EB Setup in lab

4

• Interface for Content Switch
• Configuration/Management
• Simple
• Efficient
• Reliable
• User-friendly
• Secure
• Web based interface seems to be the trend.
• Need to run a web server on the content switch.

5

• Types of interface requirements
• Configuration set parameters of switch e.g. IP
  address,
• Update rule set for switching
• Status information like currently connected
  sessions, error count on each port, number of
  packets received and sent over each port etc.

6

• Choice of Web Server
• Apache
• adv. Most popular and public domain
• disadv. Large executable ,
• elaborate directory/file system
• requirement

7
Some more Web Servers

• Avenida
• Jigsaw
• WN Web Server
• BadBlue
• Goahead

8
Goahead web server

• FREE No Royalties
• Full Featured embedded Web Server
• Dynamic content
• Active Server Pages
• In-Process CGI
• Traditional CGI support
• Embedded JavaScript
• Protocols
• HTTP 1.0
• Security
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) v 3.0
• One of the smallest memory requirement
• 60K memory footprint

9

• Rule Module Update
• Need to upload the new rules module to the
  content switch
• Form-based File Upload in HTML RFC1867
• Key concept
• Specifies FORM ENCTYPE to be
  multipart/form-data
• and method to be POST
• All different fields on the form are made
  available separated by a separator string,
  specified by attribute boundary in content-type
  at the beginning.

10
Work Done / To beCompleted

• Work done -
• Jan 2002 - Study different alternatives for
  switch/router interfaces
• Feb 2002 Determine interface requirements
• Mar 2002 Study and explore Tornado
  tools/VxWorks/IXP12EB
• Apr 2002 Study and evaluate web server
  alternatives
• May Aug 2002 Explore Goahead web server.
  Installed on Gandalf and created test CGI scripts
• Pending
• Port Goahead server onto IXP12EB,
• test CGI for file upload
• Test CGI for switching the rule module tasks
• Benchmarking

11
References

• C. Edward Chow and Weihong Wang, Design and
  Implementation of a Linux-based Content Switch .
  http//archie.uccs.edu/7Eacsd/lcs/doc/wwang/thesi
  s.doc
• C. Edward Chow and Longhua Li, The Design and
  Implementation of Content Switch on IXP12EB
• Intel? IXP1200 Network Processor
  http//developer.intel.com/design/network/products
  /npfamily/ixp1200.htm
• Goahead webserver from GoAhead Software -
  http//www.goahead.com/
• Form-based File Upload in HTML
• http//www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc
  1867.html