Netspan Northbound Interface

Introduction

The Netspan northbound interface utilises industry-standard Web Services technology.  The communication between the Web Service client or consumer and Web Service server or Provider (hosted by Netspan) is achieved via the exchange of SOAP messages over HTTP.  The services exposed by the Web Service are defined using WSDL (Web Service Description Language) files, which specify the contract between the client and server.  There are a number of software toolkits to automatically generate the Web service client code from WSDL files, thereby facilitating the easy development of Web service clients using most major programming languages / operating systems. Netspan hosts two distinct Web Services, one for SS Provisioning, and a second for viewing the currently configured Service Profiles for SSs in Netspan.  Each of these services is formally described by a WSDL file, SSProvisioning.wsdl and ServiceProfile.wsdl respectively.

Netspan SUPPORT

The Web Services northbound interface is provided in Netspan for evaluation purposes only.  By default, the interface is disabled, but can be straightforwardly enabled at any point.

Enabling the Interface

The procedure to enable the interface is as follows:

<add key="WebServiceEnabled" value="false" />

and change the value=”false” to value = ”true”.

 <Sys.Common.Security>

<add key="authenticationenabled" value="false" />

and change the value=”false” to value=”true”.

<add key="WebServiceEnabled" value="false" />

and change the value=”false” to value = ”true”.

AUTHENTICATION AND AUTHORISATION

By default, authentication is disabled, to permit use of the IE test page with Netspan Web services.  In this mode, no credentials need to be supplied to access any of the Web Service methods.  Note that the IE test page can only be used as a way of testing a local Web Service; testing of a remote Web Service is not supported.

If authentication is enabled, (by setting the ”authenticationenabled” flag to true in the Web Service Web.config, then the user name and password of a user entitled to access the Netspan Web services must be provided in the SOAP Header of every Web Service method request.

Netspan is pre-configured with an administrative user for web services, called ”wsadmin”, which has the ”WS Administrators” role.  This role automatically has rights to all Netspan web services.  An additional role, ”WS Service Provisioners”, whose access is restricted to purely the SS Provisioning methods in the web service interface is also supplied.  Both the ”wsadmin” user and ”WS Administrators” and ”WS Service Provisioners” roles are hidden by default.

Once the web service interface is enabled, the ”wsadmin” user is visible from the ”Users” page in Netspan, and it is possible to create new users having either the ”WS Administrators” or ”WS Service Provisioners” role.  Any user having the ”WS Administrators” or ”WS Service Provisioners” role should be authorised to access any of the methods described in this document.

Reference
SSProvisioning

The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://<webserver>/wimaxws1/SSProvisioning.asmx

ServiceProfile

The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://<webserver>/wimaxws1/ServiceProfile.asmx

ServiceClass

The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://<webserver>/wimaxws1/ServiceClass.asmx

ServiceProduct

The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://<webserver>/wimaxws1/ServiceProduct.asmx

PacketClassifier

The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://<webserver>/wimaxws1/PacketClassifier.asmx

VirtualLan

 The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://<webserver>/wimaxws1/VirtualLan.asmx

SSVlanPortProfile

The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://<webserver>/wimaxws1/SSVlanPortProfile.asmx

Inventory

The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://<webserver>/wimaxws1/Inventory.asmx

Fault Management

The interface can be viewed by browsing to http://localhost/wimaxws1/FaultManagement.asmx