MOP vs. Cisco, was Re: [HECnet] _PROVISIONAL_ map of HECnet, courtesy largely of Brian H.

[Ian McLaughlin]

On 2013-01-09, at 10:06 AM, Ian McLaughlin <ian at platinum.net> wrote:


On 2013-01-09, at 10:03 AM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

Get a Cisco.   It's not like they're tough to find, or very expensive.
And you'll use it essentially forever. (because it will last that long!)

But emulation is free and here today, instead of waiting two weeks for an Ebay order to arrive :)   Maybe I should try playing with it to see if it's even possible.   If we could create a nice simple turnkey VM image, maybe more Hecnet members would implement it...

(I agree the hardware is the best way to go - it's bullet-proof and lives forever)

Okay, after a bit of wrangling, I have the following setup:

Mac OSX Snow Leopard (host machine), running Ubuntu 10.10 guest machine under Virtualbox.   Inside the Ubuntu machine, I am running GNS3.   Inside GNS3, I am emulating a Cisco 7206VXR router.   Inside the router, I created a bridge back to my real 7206VXR at home.   I created an area router with a dummy address of 42.1022.

It works!   I'm getting full Hecnet routing tables.   So, I've proven that we can have a poor-man's Cisco routing solution for Hecnet with nothing more than a VM image.

If anyone is interested, I used the VM image called GNS3 Workbench from http://rednectar.net/gns3-workbench/ as my source.   I added an appropriate Cisco 7200 binary.

Ian.