Netopeer2 – NETCONF Server

Netopeer2 is a server for implementing network configuration management based on the NETCONF Protocol. This is the second generation, originally available as the Netopeer project. Netopeer2 is based on the new generation of the NETCONF and YANG libraries - libyang and libnetconf2. The Netopeer2 server uses sysrepo as a NETCONF datastore implementation.

Netopeer2 is maintained and further developed by the Tools for Monitoring and Configuration department of CESNET. Any feedback, testing or feature requests are welcome. Please contact us via the issue tracker.

Branches

The project uses 2 main branches master and devel. Other branches should not be cloned. In master there are files of the last official release. Any latest improvements and changes (of the server), which were tested at least briefly are found in devel. On every new release, devel is merged into master.

This means that when only stable official releases are to be used, either master can be used or specific releases downloaded. If all the latest bugfixes should be applied, devel branch is the one to be used. Note that whenever a new issue is created and it occurs on the master branch, the first response will likely be to use devel before any further provided support.

Packages

We are using openSUSE Build Service to automaticaly prepare binary packages for number of GNU/Linux distros. The netopeer2 packages are always build from current master branch (latest release). If you are interested in any other packages (such as src), you can browse all packages from our repository.

Requirements

• libyang
• libnetconf2
• sysrepo

Compilation and installation

$ mkdir build; cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
# make install

Compilation options

The netopeer2-server requires ietf-netconf-server and all connected YANG modules to be installed in sysrepo to work correctly. This is performed autmatically during the installation process. Moreover, default SSH configuration listening on all IPv4 interfaces and a newly generated SSH host key are imported so that it can be connected to the server out-of-the-box. However, it may not always be desired to perform all these steps even though the executed scripts check whether the modules/some configuration already exist and do not repeat/overwrite any modules/configuration.

These are the options that affect the initial setup:

INSTALL_MODULES:ON
GENERATE_HOSTKEY:ON
MERGE_LISTEN_CONFIG:ON

If cross-compiling for a different architecture, you will likey want to turn all these options off and then run the scripts setup.sh, merge_hostkey.sh, and merge_config.sh manually.

CLI

A command-line NETCONF client netopeer2-cli is included and build/installed by default. This can be adjusted by an option:

BUILD_CLI:ON

NACM

This NETCONF server implements full ietf-netconf-acm access control that bypasses sysrepo file system access control. NACM is enabled by default, so users other than root will not be allowed to write any data but should be granted read and execute permissions unless the access was modified by a NACM extension. When deploying this server, it is strongly advised to configure NACM properly.

Server configuration

Right after installation SSH listen and Call Home and TLS listen and Call Home are supported. By default, only SSH listen configuration is imported so to enable any other connection methods, they need to be configured manually. Example configuration XML files can be found in the example_configuration directory. These files can be easily modified to create configuration specific for a particular environment and configured authentication.

SSH Call Home

To enable SSH Call Home, only ssh_callhome.xml file needs to be imported to sysrepo provided that the default SSH host key genkey was imported into ietf-keystore configuration.

TLS listen

To support clients connecting using TLS, configuration files tls_keystore.xml, tls_truststore.xml, and tls_listen.xml needs to be merged into sysrepo configuration of modules ietf-keystore, ietf-truststore, and ietf-netconf-server, respectively. After doing so, a NETCONF client can connect using client.crt certificate and client.key private key and having ca.pem CA certificate set as trusted. These example certificates can be found in example_configuration/tls_certs. netopeer2-cli can easily be configured this way and the TLS connection tested.

Once connected, the client will be identified with tls-test NETCONF username.

TLS Call Home

Using the same certificates and authorization options, a TLS client can be connected to using Call Home when tls_callhome.xml file is imported. But tls_keystore.xml and tls_truststore.xml need to be imported first.