Tail-F, originally a Swedish company bought over by Cisco Systems, created a management agent software framework for network elements and applications – ConfD. If employed as a part of software – ConfD allows to be programmability an inherent part of it. This post will us a very tangible example of its power – while Linux natively doesn’t offer NETCONF to manage interfaces – with use of ConfD and special program that makes use of it – programmability is made possible.

ConfD uses, what most of up-to-speed network engineers should know, YANG – a data modeling language for NETCONF (if we treat NETCONF as a new SNMP then YANG is like SMI – “special version” of ASN.1 was for SNMP) – better description can be found here: http://www.tail-f.com/what-is-yang/

The way to depict what ConfD does is – let’s say if you create your own program that acts as a router and you need a CLI for e.g. show ip route and additionally you would like to have a possibility to check routes over the NETCONF then it’s going to be done automatically for you. ConfD will run as a process next to your routing process and will manage it’s configuration, offer CLI and NETCONF (also RESTCONF/SNMP/WebAPI if Premium version is used). Of course that means that a if you want to implement ConfD shall be a part of implementing your software, whole configuration, CLIs etc.

There are 2 versions of confd available – free (basic) and more capable (paid) premium – comparison can be found here: http://www.tail-f.com/confd-basic

More on how ConfD works and its composition (for example there is a database – CDB – that keeps the config) can be found on Tail-F site.

Let’s get to business, demonstration of how it can be used is based on:

• confd basic 6.3
• ydk 0.7.1 (there will be a separate post on ydk, installation, usage and what is it)

The very reason for using confd 6.3 is that newer versions i.e. 6.4 and 6.6 use YDK 1.1 for modelling and example program I wanted to test with YDK on newer confd versions uses YANG 1.1 while YDK has just partial support for it (full support is for YDK 1.0 – RFC 6020).

In order to install confd:

1. Download the 6.3 and 6.4 versions appropriate for you os from https://developer.cisco.com/site/confD/downloads/
2. Install it: 
   ./confd_version.installer.bin target_directory

   1	./confd_version.installer.bin target_directory

3. Source confdrc file (so as to have access to confd cli tools:
   source confd_root_dir/confdrc

   1	source confd_root_dir/confdrc

4. Run some example intro example:
   cd examples.confd/intro/example make all make start/cli

   1 2 3

   cd examples.confd/intro/example make all make start/cli

5. access confd CLI by running confd_cli command unless you started using make cli that takes you directly to CLI

 

Run the example:

Example I would like to use is called linuxcfg but id doesn’t work out of the box. When both versions 6.3.and 6.4 are installed the Makefile in ipmibs directory must be overwritten in 6.3 examples folder:

When this is done you can compile the example.

ip a from linux level:

show ip ipAddressEntry from confd level:

Ok so maybe output is not ideal like… IP addressing in HEX.

You can also use pipes and regex to filter what you only need, you can save output, export to csv, json, curly-braces (like Juniper CLI) etc.

From now on you are on your own….just kiddn’ in the next post I will show how to setup YDK and query linucfg over NETCONF with YANG models provided with this example. Now we have a running linuxcfg with confd that exposes NETCONF. More to follow…