GSoC Project Ideas 2022

Tip

Do you want to apply with us?

We have a page that describes how to increase your chances of success. Please read it carefully.

Read our Google Summer of Code guidelines.

General suggestions and warnings

  • Project ideas describe the goals we want to achieve but may miss details that have to be defined during the project: we expect students to do their own research, propose solutions and be ready to deal with uncertainty and solve challenges that will come up during the project

  • Code and prototypes are preferred over detailed documents and unreliable estimates: rather than using your time to write a very long application document, we suggest to invest in writing a prototype (which means the code may be thrown out entirely) which will help you understand the challenges of the project you want to work on; your application should refer to the prototype or other Github contributions you made to OpenWISP that show you have the capability to succeed in the project idea you are applying for.

  • Students who have either shown to have or have shown to be fast learners for the required hard and soft skills by contributing to OpenWISP have a lot more chances of being accepted: in order to get started contributing refer to the OpenWISP Contributing Guidelines

  • Get trained in the projects you want to apply for: once applicants have completed some basic training by contributing to OpenWISP we highly suggest to start working on some aspects of the project they are interested in applying: all projects listed this year are improvements of existing modules so these modules already have a list of open issues which can be solved as part of your advanced training. It will also be possible to complete some of the tasks listed in the project idea right now before GSoC starts. We will list some easy tasks in the project idea for this purpose.

Project Ideas

Adding support for automatic management of ZeroTier Tunnels

../_images/zerotier_logo_black.png

Important

Languages and technologies used: Mostly OpenWrt, Python, Django, ZeroTier.

Mentors: Gagan Deep (pandafy), Federico Capoano.

Project size: 350 hours.

Difficulty rate: hard.

OpenWISP Controller already supports configuring OpenVPN, WireGuard and VXLAN over WireGuard tunnels. The goal of this project is to add support for another VPN backend: ZeroTier.

Prerequisites to work on this project

The contributor must demonstrate good understanding of the following OpenWISP modules:

Any merged patches on any of those modules is considered an important plus point.

The contributor must also demonstrate familiarity with ZeroTier, and OpenWrt, moreover, they should be willing to increase their experience with these technologies and show enthusiasm toward learning and implementing IT network automation.

Expected outcomes

Improve netjsongraph.js for its new release

../_images/netjsongraph-default.png

Important

Languages and technologies used: Javascript, NodeJS, HTML, CSS

Mentors: Federico Capoano (more mentors TBA).

Project size: 350 hours.

Difficulty rate: medium/hard.

The goal of this project is to improve the new version of the netjsongraph.js visualization library, which is has not been released yet and is available in the gsoc2019 branch of netjsongraph.js on github.

Prerequisites to work on this project

The contributor should have a proven track record and experience with Javascript, React JS, NodeJS, HTML and CSS.

Familiarity with OpenWISP Network Topology and OpenWISP Monitoring is a plus.

Expected outcomes

  • We want to make the geographic map feature and the logical map feature more similar to MeshViewer, see the screenshots below for reference, you can find a demo of this application in the repository just linked.

../_images/mesh-viewer-map-view.png ../_images/mesh-viewer-logic-view.png

  • Fix zoom animation: when the map is zoomed, there's a delay between the zoom of the map and the repositioning of the elements which looks pretty weird

  • Add a clustering feature to the geographic map: when there are multiple overlapping elements group them as one cluster:

    • the cluster shall expand when it's hovered with the mouse

    • the cluster shall expand when the map zoom increases

    • the cluster may behave differently if the nodes have links to other nodes, a solution which works well aesthetically should be found

  • Test the library on narrow screens and ensure quirks are fixed

  • Add support for loading map data using GeoJSON

  • Allow loading more than 1000 devices by using pagination, load max 10K points by default (e.g.: maxPointsFetched), make this max value configurable

  • When more points are present than the configured maxPointsFetched value, if the map is zoomed more than a specific level (which shall also be configurable and have a good default), load more data from the API by specifying geographic extent, implement a mocking server for this feature on the server side

  • Update OpenWISP Network Topology to use the new version of this library

  • Modify OpenWISP Network Topology to provide real time updates

  • Change the code of OpenWISP Monitoring so that the map dashboard is implemented using this library instead of using its own custom implementation

Keep in mind the underlying visualization library can be changed if needed.

Add iperf bandwidth monitoring check to OpenWISP Monitoring

../_images/iperf3-cli.jpg

Important

Languages and technologies used: Python, Django, iperf3.

Mentors: Federico Capoano, Gagan Deep (more mentors TBA).

Project size: 175 hours.

Difficulty rate: easy/medium.

The goal of this project is to add a bandwidth test using iperf3, using the active check mechanism of OpenWISP Monitoring.

The use case is to perform periodic bandwidth test to measure the max bandwidth available (TCP test) and jitter (UDP).

On a macro level, the check would work this way:

  1. OpenWISP connects to the device (only 1 check per device at time) via SSH and launches iperf3 as a client, first in TCP mode, then in UDP mode, iperf is launched with the -j flag to obtain json output

  2. The collected data is parsed and stored as a metric (bandwidth information and jitter)

  3. SSH connection is closed

Prerequisites to work on this project

The student must demonstrate good understanding of OpenWISP Monitoring, and familiarity with Linux and iperf3.

Expected outcomes

The outcomes we expect from this project are the following:

  • Create iperf check class, the check must use the connection module of openwisp-controller to connect to devices using SSH

  • If a device has no active Connection the check will be skipped and a warning logged

  • This check should be optional and disabled by default

  • We can run it by default every night

  • Allow configuring the iperf server globally and by organization with a setting, e.g.:

OPENWISP_MONITORING_IPERF_SERVERS = {
    "": ["<DEFAULT_IPERF_SERVER_HERE>"],
    "<org-pk>": ["<ORG_IPERF_SERVER>"],
}

  • It shall be possible to specify a list of iperf servers, this is important because on larger systems 1 server will not be enough

  • We have to implement a lock to allow only 1 iperf check per server at time that is: for every server available, only 1 check can be performed at any one time, so the lock has to take this account when calculating the cache-key

  • SSH into device, launch iperf TCP client, repeat for UDP, collect data of both tests in a data structure

  • Handle failures, if server is down, we can store 0, which would trigger an alert (investigate the alert settings functionality)

  • Implement logic which creates the metric, chart and alert settings objects

  • Save data (tcp max bandwidth, UDP jitter)

  • Document how this check works

  • Document how to set up and use the check step by step (explain also how to set up a new iperf server)

  • Achieve at least 99% test coverage for the code added for this feature.

Github issue: [monitoring/checks] Add iperf check.

Improve UX of OpenWISP Monitoring

../_images/openwisp-monitoring-chart.png

Important

Languages and technologies used: Python, Django.

Mentors: Ajay Tripathi, Federico Capoano.

Project size: 175 hours.

Difficulty rate: easy.

The goal of this project is to improve OpenWISP Monitoring by working on features and changes that have been noted down during the last 2 years of usage of this module and have the aim of improving the user experience in analyzing the collected monitoring data, as well as the developer user experience in extracting data from the system.

Prerequisites to work on this project

The student must demonstrate good understanding of OpenWISP Monitoring, and should have a basic knowledge of NetJSON format.

Expected outcomes

Add more timeseries database clients to OpenWISP Monitoring

../_images/tsdb.png

Important

Languages and technologies used: Python, Django, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch.

Mentors: Federico Capoano, Gagan Deep (more mentors TBA).

Project size: 175 hours.

Difficulty rate: medium.

The goal of this project is to add more Time Series DB options to OpenWISP while keeping good maintainability.

Prerequisites to work on this project

The student must demonstrate good understanding of OpenWISP Monitoring, and demonstrate basic knowledge of NetJSON format, InfluxDB and Elasticsearch.

Expected outcomes