Support ANCP

[SoerenBusse]

Hey there,

we really would like to use the BNGBlaster to test our L2BSA setup. However we currently use ANCP triggered subscriber interfaces on our Juniper BNGs as described there: https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/software/junos/subscriber-mgmt-wholesale/topics/concept/ancp-layer2-bitstream-access-overview.html

So the access node sends an ANCP port-up message, gets the appropriate A10-NSP from the radius and forwards the subscriber traffic to it.

So to test like thousands of PPPoE client sessions we need to first trigger thousands of ANCP port-up messages. Currently I use your library https://github.com/GIC-de/PyANCP for it, which works absolutely great.

So currently we've to maintain two configurations and can do it only after each other. First trigger all ANCP port-up messages and afterwards establish PPPoE sessions using BNGBlaster. An build-in feature to send an ANCP port-up before establishing a PPPoE session would be a lot easier and would create a more realistic scenario.

Do you've any plans to support ANCP? Or is it already implemented and I didn't find it in the documentation.

Maybe you've an idea for a more elegant solution, like calling BNGBlaster from a Python script which also sends the ANCP port-up messages.

Thank you very much!

[GIC-de]

Hi Sören,

thank for you your valuable feedback! I know the JunOS L2BSA solution very well from my time at Juniper, but unfortunately, ANCP is currently not supported. With version 0.7.1, the BNG Blaster supports TCP protocols like BGP, so adding further TCP-based protocols like ANCP could be done similarly and I'm open to contributions from the community here.

For your use case, I would propose a new BNG Blaster command API that allows starting sessions manually. So you could run a python script using PyANCP to send an ANCP port-up followed by sending a BNG Blaster control command to start the corresponding session. This new Blaster feature could be added easily.

Regards

[SoerenBusse]

Hi Christian,

I really like the API idea to start sessions manually. That would make things far more simple :)

[GIC-de]

Could you verify if the new session-start command would work for your use case here?

BRANCH: session-start (#81)

Therefore you need to disable session autostart first:

{
    "sessions": {
        "autostart": false
    }
}

Then you can start the sessions manually by session-id.

$sudo bngblaster-cli run.sock session-start session-id 1
{
    "status": "ok",
    "code": 200
}

Alternative with VLAN which could be generally used as an alternative to session-id (https://rtbrick.github.io/bngblaster/api/index.html).

$ sudo bngblaster-cli run.sock session-start outer-vlan 1000 inner-vlan 1
{
    "status": "ok",
    "code": 200
}

[GIC-de]

@SoerenBusse Is the session-start command working for your test case?