Slashdot Mirror
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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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
The academic version is free. Unfortunately OPNET is Windows only.
OPNET and Wireshark make for some very informative lab work.
URL to some labwork used by various universities:
http://faculty.kfupm.edu.sa/coe/ashraf/RichFilesTeaching/COE081_540/BPG_OPNET/BrownLabManauls
(I'm not sure where these labs came from, I think from a book. My networks lecturer used them as lab work for a 2nd/3rd year network course)
I agree he might have to stick with a pencil and paper, but the question is well worth asking. GNS3 is free, but I thought it required non-free components to be useful (aka Cisco IOS isos or something).
He might require FOSS not just for philosophical reasons, but because he's a VOLUNTEER in KENYA. I doubt the budget is in the triple digits.
Sorry, but if we need proprietary tech to have access to knowledge, he doesn't. WE HAVE THE PROBLEM, specially in educational environment like this.
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.
I assume you have some lab computers that are already part of a network, can't you just install wireshark on them and use the existing network? You won't be able to teach everything, but you can probably cover a lot of it that way. Learning tends to be easier for me when I'm looking at the actual thing anyway. If you trust them with root access (or have automatic restores) they can experiment with different configurations too.
Take a look at CORE (http://cs.itd.nrl.navy.mil/work/core/) its open source and works on Linux/BSD
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!
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).