perfsonar development work

[Stijn Melis <>]

Hi all,

I am in the process of fixing the design flaw in the SSTELNET MP. To get 
you up to date, I'll do a quick explanation of the problem first:

When executing some commands on both a Juniper and a Cisco router, the 
parameters which need to be entered by the user are different. So if you 
query both of them in the Looking Glass, you would have to type 
different paramaters for the different devices, which isn't possible, 
and which also goes against the whole idea of the Looking Glass itself.

This was first noticed with commands which need a fixed phrase at the 
end of the command. For example:

the IP_BGP_NEIGHBOUR_ADVERTISED command on Cisco is the following:

show ip bgp neighbor <ip address> advertised-routes

while on Juniper it is this:

show route advertising-protocol bgp <ip address>

The MP treats the "advertised-routes" on the Cisco command as a 
parameter as well, so if you want to perform this command on Cisco you 
would have to type e.g. "157.193.214.243 advertised-routes" as a 
parameter, while on Juniper you could just type "157.193.214.243".

There are some other commands which have this same problem, but I fixed 
this already (those are the ones marked in yellow in the excel file).

However, when looking through the command list, I noticed some other 
commands which expect a different parameter in Cisco than in Juniper 
(marked in red in the excel file).

These can be split into two groups: in one group, the Cisco command 
expects a parameter (mostly an IP address), while on Juniper it doesn't. 
An example of this is the IPv6_ROUTE command. On Cisco it is the following:

show IPv6 route <IPv6 address>

while on Juniper it is this:

show route table inet6

Maybe these Cisco commands give a response without a parameter as well, 
but I'm not sure about that. Could someone shed some light on this, please?
Either way, this could be fixed by not using the parameter for the 
Juniper command, and  maybe adding a note to the response saying that 
the parameter wasn't used.

The other group has either a different syntax, or one or more 
parameters. For example, the IPv6_MULTICAST_BGP_TABLE command on Cisco 
is the following:

show bgp IPv6 multicast <IPv6-prefix/prefix-length>

while on Juniper it is:

show route protocol bgp table inet6.2 <IPv6-prefix>[<prefix-length>]

The problem here lies within the fact that the user can enter his 
parameters using either syntax, so it's a bit difficult to parse this. A 
possible solution would be to define a common syntax for these 
parameters, and then change this to the needed syntax when sending the 
command to the device. However, this would require a lot of hardcoded 
info in the MP with regards to the commands, and I would prefer to keep 
that to a minimum (otherwise I'd have to change the source code for the 
MP every time something changes about the commands).
Does anyone have any ideas about this, or do I keep this as it is at the 
moment (the last group that is, the rest is easy to fix)?

Cheers,

Stijn

Attachment: commands_minimum_set-v5-SM.xls
Description: application/msexcel

Attachment: commands-complete-list-v5-SM.xls
Description: application/msexcel