Network Configuration Libraries

• Student: Ahsan Barkati (ahsanb@FreeBSD.org)
• Mentors:
  • KristofProvost (kp@freebsd.org)
  • TomJones (thj@freebsd.org)

FreeBSD has high quality tools for management of the network, which includes tools to configure and manage interfaces, the firewalls and more. However these tools are not available as libraries, any software that wishes to incorporate network management must shell out to the command line tools. This limits the range of possible tools for automating control of a FreeBSD system. The aim of this project is to develop libroute, a library with APIs to manage routes.

* libroute: The manual manipulation of the network routing tables is generally achieved by the /sbin/route utility. It provides functionality to add, flush, change, show the routes along with optional modifiers which enable setting some initial parameters to the routes such as RTT, MTU etc. This project aims to create a library which brings in a method to programmatically manage the routing. This library will allow addition of the routes to the FIB and also a method to change a particular route, delete a route or even flush the whole routing table. It is also intended that the library should be able to read the complete routing table of the system and hence simulate the netstat -r command line utility.

https://github.com/ahsanbarkati/freebsd/tree/libroute/lib/libroute

• https://ahsan.live/Introduction-to-the-Network-Configuration-Libraries-in-Freebsd.html
• https://ahsan.live/blog.html