nrappkit
 

Project

Visit the nrappkit SourceForge page for project information.

The initial release of nrappkit 1.0b1 is available for download now.

Email any questions or issues to ekr@networkresonance.com.

32/64-bit WARNING

This code was developed on 32-bit platforms. It has not yet been ported to 64-bit platforms and will most likely fail. If you get it working on 64-bits, please provide patches.

Overview

nrappkit is a toolkit for building standalone applications and appliances. It provides:

• registry-based configuration (with change callbacks).
• extensible command and configuration shell
• extensible statistics system
• configurable logging system
• event and timer handling
• generic plugin system
• launcher daemon

The contents of nrappkit were extracted from Network Resonance's product on the theory that they were generally useful for application developers.

THIS PACKAGE DOES NOT GRANT A LICENSE OR RIGHT TO ANY OTHER NETWORK RESONANCE TECHNOLOGY OR SOFTWARE.

Building

You'll first need to build openssl and libedit and point your nrappkit Makefile to the correct paths. You can obtain these packages at:

• openssl-0.9.7j
• libedit-20060603-2.9

Builds are done semi-manually with port directories for each platform. There are pre-existing ports to FreeBSD, Linux, and Darwin (MacOSX). To build the system:

        cd src/make/<platform>
        gmake

Some of the platforms come in several variants. Most notably, if a platform exists in "regular" and "-appliance" variant, this means that the regular variant just builds binaries intended to be run out of the make directory (for development) and the appliance variant is intended to be installed in a real system.

By default we want to install things owned as user "pcecap". Either make this user or edit the Makefile to be a user you like (nobody).

Installing

If you're doing an appliance as opposed to a development build, you'll want to install it. This is easy:

        su
        gmake install

Most binaries and libraries ends up in /usr/local/pcecap while data files are in /var/pcecap. However, you can tweak this in the Makefile. By default it's all owned by pcecap.

To ensure that dynamic libraries are loaded correctly at runtime, you'd want to make sure the right directory is included in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH or via ldconfig.

Quick Tour

The build makes the following binaries that you may find useful:

Using the nrcapctl script is the easiest way to interact with the applications. It is run as "nrcapctl <command>" with the following commands recognized:

Note: the "start" and "stop" nrcapctl commands do nothing as they use components not included in nrappkit. However the associated script logic in nrcapctl demonstrates how additional applications might be launched using nrcapctl and particular registry settings.

Extending

When things come up, they're pretty dumb. You'll probably want to write your own applications, otherwise it's not clear why you're doing this. The general idea is that you write your application using the facilities that nrappkit provides and then write plugins to the nrappkit components as necessary. So, for example, say you want to write a network daemon. You would:

• configure the launcher to launch your daemon (using the registry, naturally).
• make calls to the registry to get configuration data
• make calls to the logging system to log data
• implement a stats module to record statistics
• write a plugin to nrsh to let people configure your parameters

Examples of some of this stuff can be found in examples/demo_plugin. Otherwise, read the source. More documentation will be on the way, hopefully.