Week 6

Swisscom Project handover at Menlo Park

Initial situation

Swisscom operates a small cloud lab in Menlo Park, California. Their main goal is to develop a state-of-the-art cloud platform. The server and network infrastructure is outsourced to a technology centre which is located around 20 minutes away from the office. The configuration of the switches (switches are network units which connect different devices, e.g. computers, servers etc., together) is an essential part for configuring the cloud platform. As a result, the switch configuration often has to be checked and eventually also revised. This is done by connecting to the switch with a command line tool and execute some instructions. To debug failures in the network, the address resolution protocol (arp) table can help to figure out where a problem comes from. To access those, you also have to connect to a specific switch with a command line tool.

Problem

The configuration file represents information about interface configurations. The arp table gives information about which devices are connected together. To get an overview about the configuration file and arp table, our project provider has to access them over a command line tool, which has no graphical user interface, no functions for an easy search through the data and no user friendly possibilities to add custom notes to an interface or a specific arp table or vlan entry. This procedure costs time and furthermore it is not really comfortable. Another difficulty is to access a previous configuration / arp table if something changes.

Solution

During our six week stay in Silicon Valley we created a web application named “swissual”. It offers a graphical user interface (GUI) with functions to upload configuration and arp files. They get stored in a database and are therefore permanently accessible. Additionally, the user can add custom notes to the configuration of the switch’s interfaces or arp table entries. Also, the loaded configuration file can be searched through. To solve the previously described shortcoming, swissual automatically backups uploaded files. So now it is pretty easy to return to a previous configuration state.

The application is accessible within the intranet of Swisscom. As an extra, the access to the application is restricted with a user identification basing on Swisscom’s active directory (AD). Therefore, no separated user administration has to be maintained. Due to the LDAP integration into our application, the login is possible with the already existing AD accounts of the Swisscom employees.

swissual's graphical user interface showing exactly the part of the configuration file extract

Outlook

We hope that swissual will simplify our project host’s daily work. There exist some conceivable expansions One scenario could be the direct communication between switches and swissual. Therefore, it would be no more necessary to upload new configurations manually. Thus to the modularity of swissual, it is possible to implement more features in the future. One opportunity may be the integration of server configurations.