Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Dynamips/Dynagen Update

Hello again. I decided to ditch the poweredge 2650. Dynamips/dynagen was simply not running well on it. I am not sure why. I was not having any luck configuring the loopback interface and terminal server either. My goal was to be able to use a tabbed terminal emulator/SSH/Telnet program to telnet into my virtual access server. For some reason Dynagen would not load the routers all the way whenever I un-commented the NIO_gen_eth:tap0 line in my .net file. Additionally, I could not ping the local loopback tap0 on the server from my LAN, meaning telnet was obviously not going to work.




You can see CPU/memory usage is minimal, even on the Ubuntu VM with only 2GB RAM. Granted I am only running 2 routers and have no active routing, but with the right idlepc values, it shouldn't be a problem. The tabbed console for routers is very nice, and I will list the command for this when I write my HOWTO on this lab setup. 

Sunday, August 21, 2011

My Current Lab Setup

I just wanted to post a couple pictures of my current lab setup. I was working with physical routers, but I decided to move to Dynamips/Dynagen to save money and time. I HIGHLY recommend to anybody that is looking to study for the CCNA and especially higher level-certifications to invest the time and money in a dedicated Dynamips/Dynagen server, such as the one I have pictured below. It is a Dell Poweredge 2650 server that I grabbed off Ebay for oh, probably 150$ a couple years back. It has been largely unused since I bought it, and I even bought 4x74GB SCSI hard drives for it a while back as well. The problem with it is that is it VERY LOUD, and having this in my living room here has been a royal pain. 

The reason I put it here in the first place was primarily because remote desktop into Ubuntu is painfully slow, even over a gigabit connection. I have not tried it with my gigabit Pfsense router to see if this improves the connection, but I plan to in the future. It would probably help to put a PCI video-card into the poweredge as well, but the object here is to save money. 

The plan is to run a Terminal Server inside Dynamips, ssh into Ubuntu, and then Telnet into the Terminal server. May sound like an overly-complicated way to do things, but it is working very well so far. I worked on it about 4 hours yesterday and I have only to tweak the terminal server and everything should be working perfectly. Then I can move the beast into the closet and give my ears a break!

Note: I HIGHLY recommend you take the time and effort to set up Dynagen/Dynamips WITHOUT GNS3, AND on a Linux Distribution. I was working with GNS3 over Packet Tracer to take advantage of some of the extra functionality, but GNS3 just kept crashing on me! Now that I have this running, on Ubuntu (much less resource intensive then Windows): http://youtu.be/-6SB-F_5Ce0 and everything is stable and barely touching the Poweredge 2650 (2x Intel Single cores w/Hyperthreading and 4gb RAM). You could build a small desktop with this kind of power for probably less then 400-500$.



About this Blog

Hello and welcome to Bits and Bytes. This Blog is going to be an ongoing work in progress, but I thought I would share with everyone my journey through the digital world. I am a 21 year old computer guru from Minnesota currently working on my CCNA, and MCSE ( as well as an AAS in computer network technology that has currently been put on hold). 


This blog will simply be a collection of my work and information that I hope some may find helpful. This will also be comparable to a cloud storage for useful information that I can refer back to in the future. I hope those that may stumble upon it find it useful and informative; if it gains any popularity I will put more work into it, but for now I will just work on it as time permits. Happy reading!