Branko Santo

Well it was time! I have pushed Dynamips on Windows to its limits, the stack dumps are becoming too often. A couple of weeks ago I managed to pony up the cash for a new nice machine and decided the best thing would be to install Linux. Considering several distributions I opted for Fedora 7 x64 since it is one of the industry standards, and I really like those.

Installation is as smooth as it is with windows, no fuss you just click next next next and finish Watch out to format you hard disks nicely since formating and mounting for a newbie is a drag. So after that was finished it was Dynamips turn to be tackled. Blindhog has a great tutorial on how to install on linux and I used parts of his tutorial but downloaded and extracted everything from the GUI. My biggest problem was finding drivers for my NIC to be able to connect to the internet (luckily my old computer was still next to me connected). When you get everything installed and you start testing there is this great feeling that everything is smooth and you have 20% utilization of your processor when you start a full InternetworkExpert lab. Now the thing that took me some time to get was how to use Terminal server. If you are on only one NIC than you are in trouble as bridging will take away your internet, but lets get to the problem.

First thing you need to do is in your .net file specify a tap interface.

f0/0 = NIO_tap:tap0

than you need to bring it up as well as your eth0 if it is not up, keep both interfaces with no IP adresses

yum install bridge-utils #install bridge utilities so you can make a bridge interface
ifconfig -a #shows you all your interfaces
ifconfig tap0 up #brings tap0 interface up
brctl addbr br0 #creates bridge br0
ifconfig br0 169.254.0.1 netmask 255.255.0.0 #adds this ip adress to your br0 interface
brctl addif eth0 #adds interface to bridge
brctl addif tap0 #adds interface to bridge
ifconfig -a #to check if everything is well setup

Now you should be able to start up TermServ from IE topology and connect from it to your other routers/switches with no problem. If you run into some kind of problem try first checking your connectivity between Fedora and TermServ by either pinging 169.254.0.2 from host or 169.254.0.1 from TermServ.

Take care and hope you have fun