1. Design of Web Interface for Advanced Content Switch Thesis proposal by Jayant Patil Department of Computer Science Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs

2. 2 Motivation There is a need for user-friendly, efficient, secure interface to manage content switches IXP1200 based content switch poses following additional challenges – –No disk –Limited memory –Realtime Embedded OS VxWorks has different network library and task management interface

3. 3 IXP12EB – Setup in lab

4. 4 Interface for Content Switch Configuration/Management Simple Efficient Reliable User-friendly Secure Web based interface seems to be the trend. Need to run a web server on the content switch.

5. 5 Types of interface requirements Configuration – set parameters of switch e.g. IP address, Update rule set for switching Status information like currently connected sessions, error count on each port, number of packets received and sent over each port etc.

6. 6 Choice of Web Server Apache : adv. : Most popular and public domain disadv. : Large executable, elaborate directory/file system requirement

7. 7 Some more Web Servers Avenida Jigsaw WN Web Server BadBlue Goahead

8. 8 Goahead web server FREE – No Royalties Full Featured embedded Web Server –Dynamic content Active Server Pages In-Process CGI Traditional CGI support Embedded JavaScript –Protocols HTTP 1.0 –Security Secure Socket Layer (SSL) v 3.0 –One of the smallest memory requirement 60K memory footprint

9. 9 Rule Module Update Need to upload the new rules module to the content switch Form-based File Upload in HTML – RFC1867 Key concept : Specifies FORM ENCTYPE to be “multipart/form-data” and method to be POST All different fields on the form are made available separated by a separator string, specified by attribute boundary in content-type at the beginning.

10. 10 Work Done / To be Completed Work done - –Jan 2002 - Study different alternatives for switch/router interfaces –Feb 2002 – Determine interface requirements –Mar 2002 – Study and explore Tornado tools/VxWorks/IXP12EB –Apr 2002 – Study and evaluate web server alternatives –May – Aug 2002 – Explore Goahead web server. Installed on Gandalf and created test CGI scripts Pending –Port Goahead server onto IXP12EB, –test CGI for file upload –Test CGI for switching the rule module tasks –Benchmarking

11. 11 References C. Edward Chow and Weihong Wang, “Design and Implementation of a Linux-based Content Switch”. http://archie.uccs.edu/%7Eacsd/lcs/doc/wwang/thesis.doc http://archie.uccs.edu/%7Eacsd/lcs/doc/wwang/thesis.doc C. Edward Chow and Longhua Li, “The Design and Implementation of Content Switch on IXP12EB” Intel  IXP1200 Network Processor http://developer.intel.com/design/network/products/npfamily/ixp1200. htm http://developer.intel.com/design/network/products/npfamily/ixp1200. htm Goahead webserver from GoAhead Software - http://www.goahead.com/ http://www.goahead.com/ Form-based File Upload in HTML – http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1867.html