Step 2. Manually overriding individual IP addresses¶

Goals¶

Automatic address assignment is great, but it is sometimes also useful to be able to manually specify IP addresses for certain nodes or interfaces. This step shows how to do that while retaining automatic assignment for the rest of the network.

The model¶

This step uses the ConfiguratorA network from the previous step. We will assign the 10.0.0.50 address to host1, and 10.0.0.100 to host3. The configurator will automatically assign addresses to the rest of the nodes.

Configuration¶

The configuration in omnetpp.ini for this step is the following:

[Config Step2]
network = ConfiguratorA
description = "Manually overriding individual IP addresses"

# Using inline XML configuration
*.configurator.config = xml("<config> \
                                <interface hosts='host3' names='eth0' address='10.0.0.100'/> \
                                <interface hosts='host1' names='eth0' address='10.0.0.50'/> \
                                <interface hosts='**' address='10.x.x.x' netmask='255.x.x.x'/> \
                             </config>")

The value for the config parameter can be supplied either inline using the xml() function, or in an external XML file using the xmldoc() function (with the file name as the argument). In this step, the XML configuration is supplied to the configurator as inline XML.

In the above XML configuration, the first two rules state that host3’s eth0 interface should get the address 10.0.0.100, and host1’s eth0 interface should get the address 10.0.0.50. The third rule is the exact copy of the default configuration and tells the configurator to assign the rest of the addresses automatically.

Note that the XML configuration contains <config> as root element. Under this root element, there can be multiple configuration elements, such as the <interface> elements here.

The <interface> element¶

An <interface> element configures a network interface or a set of interfaces, and it has two groups of attributes: selector attributes (hosts, names, towards, among, etc.) that define which interface(s) are to be configured, and parameter attributes (address, netmask, metric, etc.) that specify values to be set on those interfaces. The attributes used in the configuration above are:

The hosts selector attribute selects hosts. The selection pattern can be a full path (e.g. "*.host0") or a module name anywhere in the hierarchy (e.g. "host0"). Only interfaces in the selected hosts will be affected by the <interface> element.
The names selector attribute selects interfaces by name. Only the interfaces that match the specified names will be selected (e.g. "eth0").
The address parameter attribute specifies the addresses to be assigned. Address templates can be used, where an x in place of an octet means that the value should be selected by the configurator automatically. The value "" means that no address will be assigned. Unconfigured interfaces will still have allocated addresses in their subnets, so they can be easily configured later dynamically.
The netmask parameter attribute specifies the netmasks to be assigned. Address templates can be used here as well.

All attributes are optional. There are many other attributes available. For the complete list, please refer to the configurator’s NED documentation.

The order of configuration elements is important, but the configurator doesn’t assign addresses in the order of XML <interface> elements. It iterates interfaces in the network, and for each interface, the first matching rule in the XML configuration will take effect. Thus, statements that are positioned earlier in the configuration take precedence over those that come later.

When an XML configuration is supplied, it must contain <interface> elements in order to assign addresses at all. To make sure the configurator automatically assigns addresses to all interfaces, a rule similar to the one in the default configuration has to be included (unless the intention is to leave some interfaces unassigned.) The default rule should be the last one among the interface rules so that more specific rules can override it.

Note that after applying a manually specified address, auto address assignment will continue from that address. This may or may not be what you want.

Results¶

The assigned addresses are shown in the following image.

As in the previous step, the configurator assigned disjunct subnet addresses. Note that the configurator still assigned addresses sequentially, i.e. after setting the 10.0.0.100 address to host3, it didn’t go back to the beginning of the address pool when assigning the remaining addresses.

Sources: omnetpp.ini, ConfiguratorA.ned

Discussion¶

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