Openflow with NOX & Pronto/Pica8

We've got a Pronto 3290 at work, and with Josh Bailey's help I've been getting it talking Openflow to a NOX controller running pyswitch.

I figure the more I write about it, the more sense it'll make, so here's a summary of how far I've come:

• The pronto runs Open vSwitch, which lets you add your own flows manually - makes it easy to see what flows your controller has added too. They're supposedly going to add Openflow v1.2 support soon, which means IPv6!
• NOX doesn't find the Python bindings for OpenSSL on Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) in its current branch, but the destiny branch does - a bit of Git skill will sort this out for you
• Wireshark has an OpenFlow dissector which is part of the OpenFlow code, but it doesn't work with newer versions of Wireshark, you'll need this patch to make it build - confirmed working on Ubuntu 11.10
• Pyswitch (included as part of NOX) doesn't send back the right flows to the pronto - it sets the ethertype as 0x8100, so the flows look like this: idle_timeout=5,priority=65535,in_port=8,dl_vlan=1,dl_vlan_pcp=0,dl_src=00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX,dl_dst=00:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY,dl_type=0x8100 actions=output:3 - this is where I'm going to start modding pyswitch

And this is where I am now. The plan for the next few weeks (which will probably change) is going to be something like this:

1. Make pyswitch send correct Openflow data
2. Mod pyswitch (or a demo router app) to do some basic routing and ACL
3. Hope that someone has written a BGP Openflow app so that I don't have to - otherwise, look at options for this

I'll be back with more details