Descriptions of open source networking software for Linux or BSD systems: configuration, operation, maintenance
VirtualBox is an open-source virtual machine manager and hypervisor that may also be used as a network emulator. In addition to creating and managing individual virtual machines, VirtualBox can connect virtual machines together to emulate a network of computers and network appliances such as routers or servers. VirtualBox works on the major computing platforms: Windows, […]
This post lists the commands required on each node to build a network of three Ubuntu Linux routers. Each router is connected to the other two routers and is running quagga. Each router is also connected to a PC running Ubuntu Linux. I use this network configuration to evaluate network emulators and open-source networking software
To learn more about OpenStack cloud management software, a student or researcher may install OpenStack on a single machine, such as a laptop computer or a virtual machine, and emulate a small datacenter using virtual machines or containers. Researchers and students may choose from multiple projects that will set up OpenStack on a single machine.
OpenDaylight (ODL) is a popular open-source SDN controller framework. To learn more about OpenDaylight, it is helpful to use it to manage an emulated network of virtual switches and virtual hosts. Most people use the Mininet network emulator to create a virtual SDN network for OpenDaylight to control. In this post, I will show how
When network engineers are learning the concepts of software defined networking and SDN controllers, they may want to experiment with SDN network scenarios before learning to write programs to be used by the SDN controllers. POX is a simple-to-use SDN controller that is bundled with the Mininet SDN network emulator and is used in education
When testing SDN functions in the Mininet network emulator and viewing captured OpenFlow messages in a packet analyzer such as Wireshark, it is difficult to identify which SDN switch is the source or destination of each captured message. The only reliable way to identify which SDN switch sent or received an OpenFlow message is to
In 2014, the GNS3 development team launched a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to support development of a major new release, version 1.0, which was released in October that same year. I was happy to support the Kickstarter campaign and now I am finally getting around to taking a look at the new version of GNS3.
No Starch Press recently sent me a preview copy of a new book about the GNS3 network simulator, titled The Book of GNS3 written by Jason Neumann. This book covers the new version of GNS3, GNS3 1.x. Here is my review of The Book of GNS3. The Book of GNS3 effectively serves as a user
When a researcher uses the Mininet network simulator to create a network of hosts and switches connected to an SDN controller, he or she may wish to be able to see what the simulated network topology looks like. The POX SDN controller includes a component that will send network topology data to the Gephi data