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Visual Network Simulator To Teach Basic Networking?
unteer writes "I am a US Peace Corps volunteer currently teaching a computer technician course at a technical college in Kenya. My students have all completed the Kenyan equivalent of high school and have been accepted into a program where they give a year of nation-building non-military service in return for a technical education. My students' course load includes an introduction to computer networking, and this is where my problem lies. Do any of you know of a visual network simulator that can create an interactive network map that allows me, the instructor, to manipulate various components of a network, including the physical media, routing configuration, and which applications are being used to submit data? An example would be to have a visual of the differences between mail traffic and web traffic, and be able to show how the configuration of a wireless network might be different from a wired network. I know this may seem silly, but visuals of all this are critical to getting ideas across. It doesn't even have to be technically accurate, but rather just pictorially accurate, possibly just labeling the various components correctly. Also, it would be highly preferable if it ran on Linux, as I teach using FOSS only."
The idea is not silly at all. When I did a Networking Fundamentals subject, we used Cisco Packet Tracer to do most of what you mentioned above. Unfortunately, it isn't exactly FOSS.
There's a program from Boson(I think, not sure if the spelling is correct) that does this sort of thing. You drag and drop icons of computers, switches, routers, etc, and draw lines between them. It then simulates this network. You can see the various packets, such as ARP packets, routing protocol packets, etc, and can examine the various header bits and bytes. We used it in the network lab at the school I attended. I'm pretty sure it wasn't open source, though.
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The Visual Netkit project may interest you.
http://code.google.com/p/visual-netkit/
Hi, I would advise to try OMNeT++ it is widely used at various universities. The source code is open, and you can use it for free for non-profit and academic purposes. You can make it as simple, or as complicated as you like. Simulations can be explored live, and there is a useful animation and sequence chart feature that will make complex processes easier to communicate and understand. some links to look at: www.omnetpp.org main community page. This walkthrough of the INET Framework might actually be useful: http://www.omnetpp.org/doc/INET/walkthrough/tutorial.html To get a feel for the whole thing, I suggest you check out some of the videos (for example, the one titled "Using the IDE" from here: http://www.omnest.com/web-demos.php Or get some working demos (still the old version, but the idea is the same) from here: http://www.omnest.com/download-demosim.php I hope that helps.
I use GNS3 located at http://www.gns3.net/ and it works very well and is very easy to learn and teach others to ues
GINI (GINI is not Internet) http://cgi.cs.mcgill.ca/~anrl/projects/gini/ is a toolkit for creating virtual micro Internets for teaching and learning computer networks. It will run on both Linux and Windows.
Not sure if it's exactly what you want but check out ns2 / nam. It's a pretty good network simulator. It's open source and runs on linux.
Take a look at CORE (http://cs.itd.nrl.navy.mil/work/core/) its open source and works on Linux/BSD
Youtube has some useful videos to simulate networking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbY8Hb6abbg&feature=related
i got from the summary that the simulation would be of a fictional network, allowing the instructor to change parameters and view the effects... not sure how any government agency would care about that.
* ns2: http://nsnam.isi.edu/nsnam/index.php/Main_Page (GPL)
* Wide Area Network Emulator http://wanem.sf.net/|WANem (GPL)
I've used something called Imunes in the past with great success. It runs on FreeBSD as I recall, and is the output from an academic project somewhere. It will run happily in vmware, interacting perfectly with vmware virtual switches and physical NICs in your machine. You can create hubs, switches, routers and hosts inside the environment, hook them up with point to point links, set bandwitdth and loss parameters on those links, etc. Routers can do bgp and ospf via OSS implementations (zebra/quagga). The genius of the whole thing is that the network stack is magically instantiated per-process: thus, when you have a simulated host in your setup, it actually just manifests itself as a shell window. You can use ping, traceroute, run apache, or firefox, and it will be bound to the exact bit of the virtual network you expect it to be. With imunes, I've simulated a complete wide area network, complete with simple bgp, checkpoint secureplatform firewalls (in vmware on the same box), and an imunes host at each site. I was able to run traffic end to end over encrypted vpn tunnels from one secureplatform protected imunes host to another. One of my firewalls was a physical box, hooked in via a crossover cable. Warning: it *will* warp your mind doing this stuff in vmware... E.g. Em0 in Imunes is eth0 as presented to the vmware guest which is vmnet1 which is eth2 on my host OS. I recommend a multiple-interfaced physical machine for sanity's sake.
GNS3 is OSS. It runs best on a system with lots of RAM and a multi-core processor.
All you need beyond the initial download is a router image file (Cisco 7200, etc).
Enjoy!
What about cloonix?
Take a quick look at the screenshots: http://clownix.net/
I had a similar problem finding ways to teach basic networking such as addresses and masks and routing to non-computing students. Having looked into NS2 and similar things and finding them powerful but way too complicated (for the student's level), I settled on Clack:
Clack Graphical Router Project
It's written in Java, graphical and easy to use and does quite well at showing many of the important things. You can also extend it yourself if necessary (open source).
I don't think he said "I refuse to use non-Foss tools", I think it's more "I currently only use FOSS tools". This, because he said it should run on Linux preferably, which means he's willing to use Windows if the tool needs it.
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Why not http://clownix.net/ ? you can build a full network graphicaly and log on each machine to configure them
He mentioned "preferable", perhaps because Free solutions can be expanded Freely. His students can have personal copies of ALL the software he uses and spread it legally as they teach others.
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Some ten ( 10 ) years ago, I collaborated in the development of Visualis, a network topology manager written in Java. It has since been acquired by BMC, and now does a lot more. It should be possible to feed it with a simulated network, rather than having it discover an actual one. Have a look here: http://www.tideway.com/confluence//display/Configipedia/BMC+PATROL+Visualis+Fault+Manager There is a free community download that may suit your needs. Contact me if you need more info. Note: this is not an ad. I am not in any way involved with this corporation.
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We used a Stanford project called Clack in my Networking and Internet Protocols class. We could setup virtual networks and visualize traffic. The meat was implementing a virtual router in software and using that to route traffic in the virtual network.
Clack Homepage:
http://yuba.stanford.edu/vns/clack/
Part of the Virtual Network System
http://yuba.stanford.edu/vns/
Whoops the link was bad try this http://graffletopia.com/
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