Openvswitch 1.9.3 LTS – Debian Wheezy

I’m preparing a lab with two nodes, one with Debian Wheezy and the other one with CentOS 6.5.

I’m not a Debian guy so I hope I’m not doing things wrong, but first of all I’d like to thank again Nicira Inc as I used the information included in the README.Debian included in Openvswitch’s recent versions.

Here are my notes on how I installed Openvswitch 1.9.3 LTS, but first a warning, you may find Openvswitch in the official Debian repositories or from Ubuntu repositories, so use this post if you really can’t find the deb packages on the Internet. I just want to help 🙂

1. Let’s install some development packages. If you have any problems you can try to install the build-essential packages.

   aptitude -y install gcc make automake autoconf debhelper libssl-dev pkg-config python-all python-qt4 python-zopeinterface python-twisted-conch gdebi-core

2. Now we’re going to create a user, and “use” it to prepare the debian packages. Be patient, we need to compile.

3. useradd -s /bin/bash -m openvswitch
   su – openvswitch
   wget http://openvswitch.org/releases/openvswitch-1.9.3.tar.gz
   tar xvfz openvswitch-1.9.3.tar.gz
   mv openvswitch-1.9.3.tar.gz openvswitch_1.9.3.orig.tar.gz
   cd openvswitch-1.9.3/
   dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
   exit

4. Now as root we are going to install the Debian packages we’ve just created and generate the kernel module. Remember to accept the installations :-):

   gdebi /home/openvswitch/openvswitch-datapath-source_1.9.3-1_all.deb
   module-assistant auto-install openvswitch-datapath
   gdebi /home/openvswitch/openvswitch-common_1.9.3-1_amd64.deb 
   gdebi /home/openvswitch/openvswitch-switch_1.9.3-1_amd64.deb accept to install 
   
   [ ok ] Inserting openvswitch module. 
   [warn] /etc/openvswitch/conf.db does not exist ... (warning). 
   [ ok ] Creating empty database /etc/openvswitch/conf.db. 
   [ ok ] Starting ovsdb-server. 
   [ ok ] Configuring Open vSwitch system IDs. 
   [ ok ] Starting ovs-vswitchd. 

5. And now let’s if openvswitch is ready:

   # ovs-vsctl -V 
   ovs-vsctl (Open vSwitch) 1.9.3 
   Compiled Feb 18 2014 19:20:41
   # ovs-vsctl show 
   859be08b-200c-40dc-9863-0323a655589b 
       ovs_version: "1.9.3"

And… finished, or at least that’s what it seems.

Thanks for reading, and please visit my personal page if you want to hire me… for free.

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