The goal of Netstate (from NETwork STAck TEsts) is to help in testing network stacks. In its current state, it lets you define test suites using packetdrill to generate traffic. It was developed to test SNMP counters, and was only tested on Linux, but should be able to evolve to cover other scenarios.
Currently only packetdrill based tests are supported. When running a test, Netstate will:
- perform a setup
- generate traffic with packet drill
- validate the results observed
- clean things up
Each test is made up of 2 files having the same name except for the extesion:
- one python with extension .py file defining a class derived from the BasedTest class. The steps of a test listed above correspond respectively to the methods setup(), gen_traffic(), validate() and cleanup(). If you overwrite gen_traffic(), call self.packet_drilling with the filename of the packetdrill script you want to run, or no argument to run the default packetdrill script for this test.
- a packetdrill script with extension .drill
Defining a test is thus simply defining the test class, overriding only the methods needed, and writing a packetdrill script.
The examples directory contains example tests, you can run them with (change the path to packetdrill):
sudo python run.py -p /your/path/to/packetdrill -t ./examples
The script run.py is used to run the tests. It is invoked as
run.py [flags] tests_glob
It supports these flags:
--tests <test_dir>: the directory holding the test definitions--packetdrill <path>: which packetdrill executable to use.--sudo: invoke packetdrill with sudo--no-sudo: opposite
tests_glob is used to identify which tests to run. It can be:
- empty : run all tests in the directory specified by the --tests flag
- filename prefix: run all tests whose file name is located in the --tests dir and match tests_glob
- filename : run only the test defined in filename (without the extension)
The tests run halts at the first failing test.