Netem

Netem allows writing integration tests in Go where networking code uses Gvisor-based networking. Netem also includes primitives to emulate link latency, losses, and internet censorship (null routing, SNI-based blocking, throttling). Using netem, one can easily simulate complex integration testing scenarios involving difficult or adversarial networks.

Install instructions

We currently support go1.20.

To add netem as a dependency, run:

go get -u -v -d github.com/ooni/netem

This command will download netem and update your go.mod and go.sum.

You probably also want to manually force using the Gvisor version we're using in this library with:

go get -u -v -d gvisor.dev/gvisor@COMMIT_HASH

because Gvisor's default branch is not ready to be used with Go tools and go get would misbehave.

When updating Gvisor in this library, make sure you pin to a commit from the go branch, which is the Gvisor branch supporting go tools.

Running tests

go test .

To enable the race detector, run:

go test -race .

Note: we notice that the race detector would be very slow under macOS and many tests will fail; it still seems to be fine under Linux.

Usage

TODO(bassosimone): this section needs to be updated because we have recently removed the stdlib.go file and functionality, since we have much better functionality inside of ooni/probe-cli.

Existing Go code needs to be adjusted to support netem.

Suppose you have this Go code:

func yourCode(ctx context.Context) error {
	addrs, err := net.DefaultResolver.LookupHost(ctx, "www.example.com")
	// ...
}

You need to convert this code to use netem:

func yourCode(ctx context.Context, nn *netem.Net) error {
	addrs, err := nn.LookupHost(ctx, "www.example.com")
	// ...
}

Normally, you would create a netem.Net like this:

nn := &netem.Net{
	Stack: &netem.Stdlib{},
}

Your code will still work as intended. But, now you have the option to replace the Net underlying stack with an userspace TCP/IP network stack, for writing integration tests.

Let us do that. We start by creating a StarTopology:

topology, err := netem.NewStarTopology(&netem.NullLogger{})
if err != nil { /* ... */ }

defer topology.Close()

Then, we use AddHost to add two userspace network stacks to such a topology:

clientStack, err := netem.AddHost(
	"1.2.3.4",            // stack IPv4 address
	"5.4.3.2",            // resolver IPv4 address
	&netem.LinkConfig{},  // link with no delay, losses, or DPI
)
if err != nil { /* ... */ }

serverStack, err := netem.AddHost(
	"5.4.3.2",            // stack IPv4 address
	"5.4.3.2",            // resolver IPv4 address
	&netem.LinkConfig{},  // link with no delay, losses, or DPI
)
if err != nil { /* ... */ }

We now have the following topology:

graph TD
 client[clientStack<br>1.2.3.4]---router{Router}
 server[serverStack<br>5.4.3.2]---router

Now, we can create a DNSServer on 5.4.3.2 as follows:

dnsCfg := netem.NewDNSConfig()
dnsCfg.AddRecord(
	"www.example.com",
	"",                 // empty CNAME
	"5.6.7.8",
)

dnsServer, err := netem.NewDNSServer(
	&netem.NullLogger{},
	serverStack,
	"5.4.3.2",
	dnsCfg,
)
if err != nil { /* ... */ }

Finally, we create a netem.Net as follows:

nn2 := &netem.Net{
	Stack: clientStack,
}

and we can test yourCode as follows:

func TestYourCode(t *testing.T) {
	// ... create nn2 ...
	err := yourCode(context.Background(), nn2)
	if err != nil {
		t.Fatal(err)
	}
}

This test will test your code using the above network stacks and topology.