Using packet histories to troubleshoot networks
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Operating networks is hard. When a network goes down, network administrators have only a rudimentary set of tools at their disposal to track down the root cause of the outage. As networks have become more complicated, with more network protocols modifying the forwarding behavior below, and more application types running above, the debugging toolkit has remained essentially unchanged, with little or no innovation in years. Today, skilled network administrators frequently use manual, heuristic- driven procedures to configure and maintain networks. Humans are involved almost every time something goes wrong, and we are still far from an era of automated troubleshooting. In this dissertation, I show how packet histories--the full story of every packet's journey through the network--can simplify network diagnosis. A packet history is the route a packet takes through a network, combined with the switch state and header modifications it encounters at each switch on the route. Using packet history as the core construct, I propose an abstraction for systematic network troubleshooting, a framework with which to express the observed error symptoms and pose questions to the network. To demonstrate the usefulness of packet histories and the practical feasibility of constructing them, I built NetSight, an extensible platform that captures packet histories and enables applications to concisely and flexibly retrieve packet histories of interest. Atop NetSight I built four applications that illustrate its flexibility: an interactive network debugger, a live invariant monitor, a path-aware history logger, and a hierarchical network profiler. On a single modern multi-core server, NetSight can process packet histories for the traffic of multiple 10 Gb/s links. For larger networks, NetSight scales linearly with additional servers. To scale it even further to bandwidth-heavy enterprises and datacenter networks, I present two optimized NetSight variants using straightforward additions to switch ASICs and hypervisor-based switches.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Handigol, Nikhil Ashok |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Computer Science. |
| Primary advisor | McKeown, Nick |
| Thesis advisor | McKeown, Nick |
| Thesis advisor | Johari, Ramesh, 1976- |
| Thesis advisor | Mazières, David (David Folkman), 1972- |
| Advisor | Johari, Ramesh, 1976- |
| Advisor | Mazières, David (David Folkman), 1972- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nikhil Ashok Handigol. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Computer Science. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2013 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Nikhil Ashok Handigol
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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