Blu3c4t's Journal

Have not much budget to buy a new Cisco router, but you really wanna 'play' with it ?
I suggest you to try Dynamips...

So, what is Dynamips ?! Ok, Dynamips is a Cisco router emulator written by Christopher Fillot... This stuff can emulates 1700, 2600, 3600, 3700, and 7200 hardware platforms, and runs standard Cisco IOS images. Dynamips itself can runs on various OS platform like Windows, Linux, and ofcourse my lovely OS FreeBSD...
According to its main developer, Dynamips would be useful to:

• Be used as a training platform, with software used in real world. It would allow people to become more familiar with Cisco devices, Cisco being the world leader in networking technologies ;
• Test and experiment features of Cisco IOS ;
• Check quickly configurations to be deployed later on real routers.

Although Dynamips provides a simple virtual switch, it does not emulate Catalyst switches, and as a warning, Dynamips surely cannot replace a real router, it is simply a complementary tool to real labs for administrators of Cisco networks or people wanting to pass their CCNA/CCNP/CCIE exams.
Now, let install it on FreeBSD system !

[blu3c4t@mahardhika ~]$ whereis dynamips
dynamips: /usr/ports/emulators/dynamips
[blu3c4t@mahardhika ~]$ su
Password:
[root@mahardhika /home/blu3c4t]# cd /usr/ports/emulators/dynamips
[root@mahardhika /usr/ports/emulators/dynamips]# make install clean
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Wait till the installation process finish, and then you can play around with your emulator...

To running Dynamips you need a Cisco IOS images, you can download it somewhere at Internet...
After that, we need to uncompress the image first, as an example:
[blu3c4t@mahardhika ~]$ unzip -p C7200-Is-Mz_20122-15_20T5.bin > my_C7200image.bin

if you receive a warning from Unzip, don't worry you can safely ignore it...

Running the Dynamips :
[blu3c4t@mahardhika ~]$ dynamips my_C7200image.bin -t npe-400 -r 128 -l dynamips_session.txt

Dynamips will boot the images and you can doing basic configuration to your router while that process happen, this is my screenshot from the shell :


Options at that comand mean:

• -t Select NPE type
• -r Set the virtual RAM size
• -l Set logging file

There any many other options, for detail you can looking at Dynamips manual...

Summary
Dynamips have good performance as Cisco IOS emulator, and it offers many feature which can help us to learn more about Cisco router technology...

For more tips, this link will be useful:
http://7200emu.hacki.at/