Installing GENI Tools/Omni on FreeBSD


I have been asked to use GENI to test some software I have written at CacheCash/NYU. To communicate with GENI, you usually use a tool called Omni.

FreeBSD has been my choice of desktop operating system since 2012, and since I am using my personal machine, my work is being done on FreeBSD.

However, Omni only supports Python 2 while FreeBSD’s default version of Python is Python 3. Not that a default of Python 3 is a bad thing (I think it’s a blessing), but some additional steps are needed to install run Omni in this case.

First, you need to install the dependencies using the command below:

sudo pkg install py27-m2crypto py27-dateutil py27-openssl xmlsec1 py27-xmlsec autoconf

Then, you should download Omni’s source code which can be found on Omni’s respective GitHub Wiki page.

Once you have downloaded and extracted the archive, you need to tell Omni and autoconf to use Python 2. To do that, run:

setenv PYTHON python2 # To tell autoconf to use Python 2 and not 3
find geni-tools-2.10 -type f -exec sed -i '' -e 's/env python/env python2/g' {} \; # So the scripts call Python 2

Replace geni-tools-2.10 with your extracted directory. Keep in mind that you have to call it from the parent directory of the geni-tools directory because ./ results in Invalid Command Codes errors.

Then, you should configure and build Omni. To do that, run:

cd geni-tools-2.10
autoreconf -i
./configure
make

Replace geni-tools-2.10 with your extracted directory.

Now, you should install Omni. To do this, run:

sudo make install

And after that, you should be able to use Omni and GENI as normal.