Introduction

Network Config Host Provider is a host provider that learns host information from network config subsystem rather than packet-in.
There are two main benefit that Network Config Host Provider can offer:

1. Block unexpected hosts
   In some use cases such as CORD, the network orchestrator (XOS) knows all hosts that suppose to be in the system. We can easily avoid interference from unexpected hosts by explicitly specify which hosts we want to allow in network config.
2. Debugging
   We can easily mock up and inject a host through network config.

Network config subsystem already provides Java API and REST API. Which makes Network Config Host Provider very easy to use.

How to Use

Enable Network Config Host Provider

The openflow meta application contains openflow-base, hostprovider and lldpprovider.
You can set the following into ONOS_APPS environment variable to replace hostprovider with netcfghostprovider.

export ONOS_APPS=drivers,openflow-base,netcfghostprovider,lldpprovider

Alternatively, since Network Config Host Provider is an application, it can also be enabled/disabled dynamically through ONOS CLI

app deactivate org.onosproject.openflow
app activate org.onosproject.openflow-base org.onosproject.netcfghostprovider org.onosproject.lldpprovider

Provide Host Information in Network Config

You can upload hosts network config by POSTing a JSON file to:

http://<ip>:8181/onos/v1/network/configuration/hosts

Here is an JSON example:

{
  "00:02:c9:1e:b1:20/None": {
    "basic": {
      "ips": ["10.0.1.1", "10.0.1.2"],
      "locations": ["of:0000000000000001/5"]
    }
  },
  "00:02:c9:1e:b1:21/None": {
    "basic": {
      "ips": [],
      "locations": ["of:0000000000000001/13"]
    }
  }
}