Overview

The Nettools Project is a reusable implementation of network configuration standards for Linux. At its core, it provides independent libraries that implement the most common RFCs related to network configuration and management. On top of these, it provides services that extend these libraries, as well as other networking resources, to provide an integrated view of all these sources at runtime.

The Nettools Project implements standards that are at the core of network configuration. While many of these have been around for decades, the implementations provided by the Nettools Project focus on a few key aspects:

• No Policy: Every network standard that is implemented by the Nettools Project comes with a pure library implementation, that provides access to the standard without placing additional policies. These libraries provide networking standards that are as close to the respective specifications as possible, while placing limited to no restrictions on top. On the contrary, these implementations are explicitly written without any specific environments in mind, but allow any networking manager or service to make use of them. This also implies that the APIs allow full control of the protocol behavior.

• Asynchronous: Since network safety is crucial today, all implementations and services are provided with a fully asynchronous API. This allows placing their instances into isolated environments, while mapping the API to an asynchronous message-based interface. That is, while the libraries provide in-process APIs, they are explicitly written in a way that they can be mapped easily to a message-based communication channel. Adopters of these libraries are highly recommended to isolate execution of these protocols and make use of the asynchronous API.

• 21st Century: Networking standards like DHCP and ACD have been around for decades. Thus, they were written against hardware that was obsoleted many years ago. Modern hardware often no longer fits the models used in the 70ths. Therefore, the nettools implementations try to port old standards to modern hardware, providing knobs to tune parameters that no longer apply in the 21st century (no, today it is no longer acceptable to wait 9s on local links for address conflict detection to finish).

• Linux-Only: Network configuration requires explicit knowledge of the corresponding counter-parts in the kernel. While high-level APIs may resemble each other across UNIX Derivatives, the underlying technologies differ. The Nettools Project aligns all implementations with modern Linux Kernel releases and makes use of linux-only features to improve performance and security of these implementations.

Projects

• n-acd: IPv4 Address Conflict Detection

  The n-acd project implements the IPv4 Address Conflict Detection standard as defined in RFC-5227. The state machine is implemented in a shared library and provides a stable ISO-C11 API. The implementation is linux-only and relies heavily on the API behavior of recent linux kernel releases.

  • Repository: @github

• n-dhcp4: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv4

  The n-dhcp4 project implements the IPv4 Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol as defined in RFC-2132+.

  • Repository: @github

• n-ipv4ll: IPv4 Link-Local Address Selection

  The n-ipv4ll project implements link-local address selection for IPv4 as defined in RFC-3927. The implementation is linux-only and relies on modern linux kernel behavior and features.

  • Repository: @github

Maintenance

All nettools projects are released under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0, Copyright © 2015-2019 Red Hat, Inc. as well as the terms of the Lesser General Public License 2.1+.

• License: Apache Software License 2.0
• License: Lesser General Public License 2.1+
• Maintainers: David Rheinsberg, Tom Gundersen
• Mailing-List: nettools-devel @googlegroups