Installation

Common Installation Tasks

These tasks are required by all installation methods.

You will need to provide an initial configuration files for FAUCET and Gauge, and create directores for FAUCET and Gauge to log to.

mkdir -p /etc/faucet
mkdir -p /var/log/faucet
$EDITOR /etc/faucet/faucet.yaml
$EDITOR /etc/faucet/gauge.yaml

This example faucet.yaml file creates an untagged VLAN between ports 1 and 2 on DP 0x1. See Configuration for more advanced configuration. See Vendor-specific Documentation for how to configure your switch.

vlans:
    100:
        description: "dev VLAN"
dps:
    switch-1:
        dp_id: 0x1
        interfaces:
            1:
                native_vlan: 100
            2:
                native_vlan: 100

This example gauge.yaml file instructs Gauge to poll the switch at 10s intervals and make the results available to Prometheus. See Configuration for more advanced configuration.

faucet_configs:
    - '/etc/faucet/faucet.yaml'
watchers:
  port_stats:
      dps: ['switch-1']
      type: 'port_stats'
      interval: 10
      db: 'prometheus'
  flow_table:
      dps: ['switch-1']
      type: 'flow_table'
      interval: 10
      db: 'prometheus'
dbs:
  prometheus:
      type: 'prometheus'
      prometheus_port: 9303
      prometheus_addr: ''

Installation using APT

We maintain a apt repo for installing faucet and its dependencies on Debian based Linux distributions.

Here is a list of packages we supply:

Package Description
python3-faucet Install standalone faucet/gauge python3 library
faucet Install python3 library, systemd service and default config files
gauge Install python3 library, systemd service and default config files
faucet-all-in-one Install faucet, gauge, prometheus and grafana. Easy to use and good for testing faucet for the first time.

Installation on Debian/Raspbian 8 (jessie)

Installing faucet on jessie requires jessie-backports.

First follow the official instructions on adding the backports repo to jessie.

sudo apt-get install curl apt-transport-https gnupg lsb-release
echo "deb https://packagecloud.io/faucetsdn/faucet/$(lsb_release -si | awk '{print tolower($0)}')/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/faucet.list
curl -L https://packagecloud.io/faucetsdn/faucet/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports python3-oslo.config libjs-jquery libjs-mustache
sudo apt-get update

Then to install all components for a fully functioning system on a single machine:

sudo apt-get install faucet-all-in-one

or you can install the individual components:

sudo apt-get install faucet
sudo apt-get install gauge
Private NPM registry and Maven, RPM, DEB, PyPi and RubyGem Repository · packagecloud

Installation on Debian/Raspbian 9+ and Ubuntu 16.04+

sudo apt-get install curl gnupg apt-transport-https lsb-release
echo "deb https://packagecloud.io/faucetsdn/faucet/$(lsb_release -si | awk '{print tolower($0)}')/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/faucet.list
curl -L https://packagecloud.io/faucetsdn/faucet/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update

Then to install all components for a fully functioning system on a single machine:

sudo apt-get install faucet-all-in-one

or you can install the individual components:

sudo apt-get install faucet
sudo apt-get install gauge
Private NPM registry and Maven, RPM, DEB, PyPi and RubyGem Repository · packagecloud

Installation with Docker

We provide official automated builds on Docker Hub so that you can easily run Faucet and it’s components in a self-contained environment without installing on the main host system.

See our Docker section for detauls on how to install and start the Faucet and Gauge docker images.

You can check that Faucet and Gauge are running via systemd or via docker:

service faucet status
service gauge status
docker ps

Installation with pip

You can install the latest pip package, or you can install directly from git via pip.

First, install some python dependencies:

apt-get install python3-dev python3-pip
pip3 install setuptools
pip3 install wheel

Then install the latest stable release of faucet from pypi, via pip:

pip3 install faucet

Or, install the latest development code from git, via pip:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/faucetsdn/faucet.git

Starting Faucet Manually

Faucet includes a start up script for starting Faucet and Gauge easily from the command line.

To run Faucet manually:

faucet --verbose

To run Gauge manually:

gauge --verbose

There are a number of options that you can supply the start up script for changing various options such as OpenFlow port and setting up an encrypted control channel. You can find a list of the additional arguments by running:

faucet --help

Starting Faucet With Systemd

Systemd can be used to start Faucet and Gauge at boot automatically:

$EDITOR /etc/systemd/system/faucet.service
$EDITOR /etc/systemd/system/gauge.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable faucet.service
systemctl enable gauge.service
systemctl restart faucet
systemctl restart gauge

/etc/systemd/system/faucet.service should contain:

faucet.service
[Unit]
Description="Faucet OpenFlow switch controller"
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/default/faucet
User=faucet
Group=faucet
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/faucet --ryu-config-file=${FAUCET_RYU_CONF} --ryu-ofp-tcp-listen-port=${FAUCET_LISTEN_PORT}
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

/etc/systemd/system/gauge.service should contain:

gauge.service
[Unit]
Description="Gauge OpenFlow statistics controller"
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/default/gauge
User=faucet
Group=faucet
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/gauge --ryu-config-file=${GAUGE_RYU_CONF} --ryu-ofp-tcp-listen-port=${GAUGE_LISTEN_PORT} --ryu-wsapi-host=${WSAPI_LISTEN_HOST} --ryu-app=ryu.app.ofctl_rest
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Virtual Machine Image

We provide a VM image for running FAUCET for development and learning purposes. The VM comes pre-installed with FAUCET, GAUGE, prometheus and grafana.

Openstack’s diskimage-builder (DIB) is used to build the VM images in many formats (qcow2,tgz,squashfs,vhd,raw).

Pre-built images are available on our build host https://builder.faucet.nz.

Installing on Raspberry Pi

We already provide a Raspberry Pi image running FAUCET which can be retrieved from the latest faucet Raspbian image download.

The image can then be copied onto an SD card following the same steps from the official Raspberry Pi installation guide.

Once you have booted up the Raspberry Pi and logged in using the default credentials you can follow through the Installing faucet for the first time tutorial starting from Configure prometheus to properly configure each component.

Note

It is strongly recommended to use a Raspberry Pi 3 or better.

Building the images

If you don’t want to use our pre-built images, you can build them yourself:

  1. Install the latest disk-image-builder
  2. Install a patched vhd-util
  3. Run build-faucet-vm.sh

Security Considerations

This VM is not secure by default, it includes no firewall and has a number of network services listening on all interfaces with weak passwords. It also includes a backdoor user (faucet) with weak credentials.

Services

The VM exposes a number of ports listening on all interfaces by default:

Service Port
SSH 22
Faucet OpenFlow Channel 6653
Gauge OpenFlow Channel 6654
Grafana Web Interface 3000
Prometheus Web Interface 9090

Default Credentials

Service Username Password
VM TTY Console faucet faucet
SSH faucet faucet
Grafana Web Interface admin admin

Post-Install Steps

Grafana comes installed but unconfigured, you will need to login to the grafana web interface at http://VM_IP:3000 and configure a data source and some dashboards.

After logging in with the default credentials shown above, the first step is to add a prometheus data source, use the following settings then click Save & Test:

Name:   Prometheus
Type:   Prometheus
URL:    http://localhost:9090

Next we want to add some dashboards so that we can later view the metrics from faucet.

Hover over the + button on the left sidebar in the web interface and click Import.

We will import the following dashboards, just download the following links and upload them through the grafana dashboard import screen:

You will need to supply your own faucet.yaml and gauge.yaml configuration in the VM. There are samples provided at /etc/faucet/faucet.yaml and /etc/faucet/gauge.yaml.

Finally you will need to point one of the supported OpenFlow vendors at the controller VM, port 6653 is the Faucet OpenFlow control channel and 6654 is the Gauge OpennFlow control channel for monitoring.