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Where is the debugger for my software-defined network?

Published: 13 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The behavior of a Software-Defined Network is controlled by programs, which like all software, will have bugs - but this programmatic control also enables new ways to debug networks. This paper introduces ndb, a prototype network debugger inspired by gdb, which implements two primitives useful for debugging an SDN: breakpoints and packet backtraces. We show how ndb modifies forwarding state and logs packet digests to rebuild the sequence of events leading to an errant packet, providing SDN programmers and operators with a valuable tool for tracking down the root cause of a bug.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HotSDN '12: Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
August 2012
142 pages
ISBN:9781450314770
DOI:10.1145/2342441
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 13 August 2012

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Author Tags

  1. interactive
  2. network debugging
  3. software-defined networks

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  • Research-article

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SIGCOMM '12
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SIGCOMM '12: ACM SIGCOMM 2012 Conference
August 13, 2012
Helsinki, Finland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 198 submissions, 44%

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