Experiences and adventures in the Cisco and Linux world…

It’s been a while I’ve been able to post on the blog, sorry for this but I’ve been really busy with work anyhow more on this later on

What I want to show you on this post is how to add a PC to our "virtual" Dynamips topology, why you’re wondering? Well for testing our topology my friends, you could, of course, use a real computer or simply add another router to your topology but why wasting resources when all we need is a box being able to use ping or traceroute just for testing purposes?

All you need is to download a software called Virtual PC Simulator which is a free software that runs both under Windows and Linux systems and can be found here . Once you’ve downloaded the software extract it somewhere on your computer and launch it (vpcs.exe) a dos window will open up if you need help using VCP just type a ? for instructions :

VPCS expect a file named startup.vpc in which is defined the startup configuration of your virtual hosts, you can easily edit this file with your favorite editor to suit your needs (notice the editor I’m using here ) :

In case you don’t like to edit configuration files as I did you can simply use the command ip to assign an IP address and default gateway here’s an example :

ip 10.0.0.5 10.0.0.1 24

This will assign the ip address of 10.0.0.5 in the 255.255.255.0 subnet with a default gateway of 10.0.0.1. Ok now let’s integrate VPCS into our GNS3 installation.

First off open up GNS3 and select Symbol Manager under the Edit menu when the Symbol Manager window appear on the left pane select Computer and double click it to add to the right pane of Customized nodes. Under Customized node settings type a name of your choice, I opted for Computer what a fantasy, and be sure to select Cloud under Type :

Back to GNS3 main page a Computer icon should have appeared between the available Symbols, drag a computer in your internetwork and right click on it and select Configure and input what in the figure :

Now connect your PC to the switch, check my previous post if you’re in doubt on how to create a link between two devices. Basically what we’ve done is configured each computer as a cloud that connect to GNS3 via UDP ports designated. Now all you have to do is to configure the PC with the proper IP address, if you’ve not done that yet, and configure the proper interfaces on the routers so that you’ll be able to ping/traceroute connections in your internetwork.