Suggestion for network-related project

[Matthew Seaman]

On 14/03/2018 11:27, Ahmad Syahir Shahrin wrote:
> I originally posted this on the forum but someone think I would fare
> better on the mailing list. I don’t know if this is the right
> mailing-list to post but I’ll take my chance. Here it is.

You'ld probably find one of the  more technical lists more useful, 
especially once you've narrowed down the scope of your project. 
freebsd-questions@ is good for less directed questions, and 
freebsd-hackers@ is good for more technical discussions which don't fit 
into any of the more specific lists.

> I need to come up with a 2-3 months duration school project but
> couldn’t figure what to do. I enroll in data communication and
> networking course but the main focus has always been about configuring
> interfaces, addressing, routing, NAT, ACL and pretty much what they have
> on Cisco’s network academy for routing & switching track. I also make
> myself to understand the different protocols used in basic TCP/IP
> communication and their format(Ethernet II, ARP, IPv4, IPv6, NDP and
> etc.). I’m thinking about using virtualization such as VirtualBox and
> GNS3 and of course I’d love to squeeze FreeBSD into the picture wherever
> possible. I can program a little bit in C, Java, Perl and shell but I
> wouldn’t count that much on them. That said, I’d be very grateful for
> any suggestion.

One thing you might find interesting is looking at how you can manage an 
IP address range allocation across a diverse range of client systems: 
routers, firewalls, switches, servers, end-user client machines in an 
efficient and error-free way.

There's plenty of prior art in doing this, so a lot of the project would 
be researching how other people / companies have done this.  What all 
those things should have in common is some single, central "source of 
truth" -- generally known as an IPAM system.  (For example, this is a 
good product: https://github.com/digitalocean/netbox -- it needs a bit 
of porting work to get it running on FreeBSD, which I have been looking 
at, but not got very far with yet.)

The interesting part comes in how you integrate your IPAM database with 
DHCP and DNS servers, with directory systems like FreeIPA or Active 
Directory, with configuration management software like Puppet or 
Ansible, etc. etc. particularly at scale, where the importance of having 
a single central source of truth is magnified.

	Cheers,

	Matthew