A bit of back history: I came from BSD land. I was a FreeBSD user from way back in the 1990s. BSD land is a land of secure boxes and very high uptimes. It’s also a land of arguably clunky package support, a lot of compiling by hand and these days, not nearly as encompassing package and network tuning support. I decided to move to Linux a while ago, reluctantly, and chose Debian as my flavor of choice. I do love debian, however, I very quiuckly realized that even debian is a bit of a fringe OS build of Linux. Commercial support is nearly all based on RHEL. Folks that run RHEL also run CentOS. We run both in my day job. About a year ago to I, once again, decided I needed to learn CentOS.
There are a lot of posts about building floodlight as an openflow controller. I used this tutorial Brent Salisbury did to build mine. There is a good one on the openflow hub site as well. I’ve found that many are based on Debian or Ubuntu, which can be subtly different than a CentOS / RHEL experience.
 
In CentOS, log in and sudo -s or su to root. Install the prereqs:
yum -y install build-essential default-jdk ant python-dev eclipse git
mkdir /services/floodlight
cd /services/floodlight/
git clone git://github.com/floodlight/floodlight.git
ant
Start floodlight in the background.
./floodlight.sh &
Because I’m terrible at looking at directions, I went to the base URL. This will yield an error that looks something like this:
{“name”:”Not Found”,”error”:true,”throwable”:null,”description”:”The server has not found anything matching the request URI”,”success”:false,”informational”:false,”code”:404,”reasonPhrase”:”Not Found”,”uri”:”http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.4.5″,”serverError”:false,”connectorError”:false,”clientError”:true,”globalError”:false,”redirection”:false,”recoverableError”:false}
The right way to access floodlight is to use the entire URL:
http://<address>:8080/ui/index.html
Learn from my stupidity.
 
Here is a script to build it for you:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Installing prerequisits:"
yum -y install build-essential default-jdk ant python-dev eclipse git
echo "Installing floodlight to /services/floodight/"
mkdir /services/floodlight
cd /services/floodlight/
git clone git://github.com/floodlight/floodlight.git
ant
echo "Starting floodlight:"
./floodlight.sh&
echo "Floodlight started, point your beowser at http://<address>:8080/ui/index.html"