- So in this video I'd like to finally get into
the process of locating the GNS3 software.
Where do I go to find the software
and how do I download it?
And what does it look like as I'm
installing it on my laptop?
So let's talk a little bit about that stuff.
So to begin with, if you haven't
already gone to their website,
you're gonna wanna go to GNS3.com,
as you can see right here, GNS3.com.
And if you haven't already done so,
you're gonna wanna click on log in,
and sign up, and from here you're gonna
type in your username and password
that you're gonna wanna use.
So it's free, no Visa or MasterCard required.
But it's gonna be necessary in order
to download the software;
also we'll gice you access to the GNS3 Community
so you can see questions that people pose and the answers,
you can pose your own questions,
read some documents there.
So go ahead and log in.
And then from here you got a couple of choices.
You could either go up here to where it says software,
or you could just click on the
big, blue Free Download button.
And you're gonna wanna select the platform
that you're gonna wanna use.
Now let me just make a quick mention here.
All the demonstrations I'm gonna be doing
are based on Microsoft Windows.
However once you've got GNS3 installed and running
it pretty much operates the exact, same way,
the GUI looks exactly the same,
whether it's on Windows or a Mac or Linux,
very little variation there,
so pretty much everything I'm gonna
teach you will be applicable no matter
which these platforms you're using.
Now two general high level differences right here.
So if you click any of these download buttons here,
what you're gonna be doing is you're gonna be
downloading GNS3 and running it as
what we call the Local Server option.
So really what that means is
that you're gonna be running GNS3
directly on top of your operating system.
It's no different than when you're
opening up your web browser
whether it be Google Chrome or Internet Explorer,
or you're opening up your email application,
or your instant messaging chat application.
All of those are examples of software
that opens up and runs directly on top of
your operating system whether your operating system
is Windows or Mac or Linux or whatever it may be.
So what's the other option?
Well you can see down here,
and I'll hover over this a little bit
to make it a little bit larger,
Download the GNS3 VM, virtual machine.
What's that referring to?
Well, if you're gonna use that,
one additional dependency in order to use that
is to have some sort of VM software,
like either VirtualBox or VMware.
Now VirtualBox is free;
VMware Player is free,
and then there's other versions of VMware that are not free.
But you're gonna have to have either
VirtualBox or VMware to use the GNS3 VM.
Now you might be thinking to yourself,
okay, well sounds like it'd be sort of,
why would I go through all that extra hassle
to download the GNS3 VM that's gonna require
these other software, VirtualBox or VMware,
when instead I could just bypass all that
and just click Download right here for Windows,
or Download right here for Mac?
So, why would I download the GNS3 VM?
Okay, if your sole intention
of using GNS3 is simply to build
Cisco router and switch topologies,
you just wanna practice Cisco routing
and switching and that's it.
Then that particular case,
there probably is not very much of a need
to download the VM, the GNS3 VM.
You can probably just run it as a local server
by clicking Download right here.
Where the GNS3 VM really comes into play,
where it's really useful to you,
is once you start getting into more
advanced technologies where you're gonna be using
other operating systems like maybe
June OS or something else like that,
or maybe you wanna integrate other
things into your topology,
maybe for example you wanna integrate
some sort of firewalls or adaptive security appliances
or some network monitoring software applications,
most of the time when you're doing that
kind of fancy, extra, advanced stuff,
you need to run that alongside the GNS3 VM.
It doesn't really work when GNS3 is running
as the Local Server option
directly on top of your operating system.
But if you're watching this series of videos
that's probably not your intent.
You're probably watching this because
you wanna create Cisco route and switching topologies
to help you prepare for your CCNA and your CCNP,
and even to some extent, your CCIE as well.
So in that particular case, just go ahead
and click right here on Download.
And then it will actually download as you can see.
I'll go ahead and make that a little bit larger.
Not very large, only about 43.6 megabytes.
And as of the time of this recording,
the current latest revision is 1.4.4.
Okay, and then once you've downloaded that
you can go ahead and close up your browser.
And then go to wherever that download was.
In this particular case,
I've placed my downloads here under,
I'll go ahead and talk about these
other things in just a second.
Under GNS3.
And here's the 1.4.4 all-in-one.
So you can see what those various flavors look like.
And here's the GNS3 Virtual Machine,
what that would look like.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and double click
on that to open it up
and let's go ahead and walk through the process.
Okay, I can close this.
And so now we start entering the GNS3 setup wizard.
And yes, I wanna agree to the license,
otherwise I can't use the software.
Go ahead and hit Next.
Now I just want to spend a little bit
of time right now talking about this
because you can see that, in addition to GNS3,
you're gonna get a whole bunch of other stuff as well.
Now all this by default is selected.
You can unselect some of it,
some of it is required.
Generally the recommendation is
just let it install all this stuff
but if you're like me, you say,
hey, I wanna know what each one of these things is,
what is it installing on my system?
So let me just take a little bit of time
to talk about each one of these.
First of all, WinPcap, what is that?
Well, right here directly from WinPcap.org,
basically, what WinPcap is, it's a driver.
It's a driver that you install in your laptop
and what it allows your laptop to do is,
if you've been studying networking at all,
whether you're preparing for your CCNA or anything else,
you know that when your Ethernet cable
is plugged into your laptop,
yet that Ethernet nic on your laptop
is seeing all kinds of Ethernet frames.
Not necessarily just frames for you,
frames for lots of other people
connected to your broadcast domain.
Now the default behavior of your nic card is
as every single frame comes in
the nic card says, is this for me?
Is this something I need to pay attention to
or is this not for me?
If it's not for me, it just deletes it.
It ignores it, and so the CPU within your laptop
never even sees that frame
because it's not for you.
But when you're doing your network training
and learning these protocols,
a lot of times one of the best ways
to learn protocols is to open up
something called a packet sniffer.
For example, Wireshark is a classic example
of a free packet capture tool.
And the intent behind software like that
is that you do wanna see everything.
You wanna see every single frame,
every single packet that your nic card saw.
Even stuff that isn't necessarily meant for you.
For example, if you wanna connect the two routers
and see routers doing EIGRP or OSPF,
that's not for you, that's not for your laptop.
So if your nic card saw those packets,
it would never display in your packet capture tool,
in your Wireshark tool,
because it would never get to your CPU.
That's where WinPcap comes into play.
When you have WinPcap installed,
it can put your network interface card
into something called promiscuous mode,
which is simply a fancy way of saying,
hey, nic card, every single thing that you see,
send it to the processor. Every thing.
So basically, the way all this works hand in hand
is that when you open up your packet capture tool
like Wireshark for example,
Wireshark in turn invokes the services of WinPcap.
And Wireshark says, hey WinPcap,
I'm a process running here,
please put the nic card into promiscuous mode
and forward to me every single packet,
every single frame that you see.
So without WinPcap, your packet capture tools
would be pretty much useless
because all they would be able to display for you
are packets leaving from your laptop
or packets destined to your laptop.
You wouldn't be able to see all that other stuff
you wanna see, like CDP and BGP and BTP
and all that other stuff.
So that's why we need WinPcap.
What else is in here?
Well, we've got Wireshark, so that's nice.
Wireshark is a free download,
but fortunately for us it's already built into GNS3.
Now if you already have Wireshark on your laptop,
don't worry, when it gets to this step,
it'll say, hey, I already see it.
And you can actually cancel out of it
and cancel that section.
The SolarWinds Response Time Viewer
is a really cool tool.
Basically what this does, it's sort of like
a high level tool that sorts and categorizes
and classifies your traffic.
Because if you've ever worked with Wireshark
where it's capturing everything,
within just like a minute you can have thousands
and thousands of packets just depending
on busy your network is.
As your scrolling through all that stuff,
it can be kinda hard to see,
if your overall question is what's going on in my network?
What are the typical types of protocols
an applications are running right now?
And what's the response time,
when a packet comes out, how fast is the reply coming back?
I just want a sort of overview
of what's going on in my network
and with Wireshark, kinda hard to get that information.
Now of course there's all sorts of filters and
stuff built into Wireshark to give you that information
but with the SolarWinds Response Time Viewer,
it works hand in hand with Wireshark.
So when you've got Wireshark running
and you stop and you got all these miscellaneous
packets that you've captured,
you can save that Wireshark capture file.
You can save it to your laptop
or your hard drive or something.
Then you can open up the SolarWinds Response Time Viewer
to view that capture file,
and it gives you a real high level like,
TCP conversations, HTTP conversations.
It gives you a good snapshot of
what's really going on in your network.
So it's a really useful tool to have.
Dynamips, gotta have that.
So if we're running GNS3 as a local server,
in other words we downloaded it
just like any other application
and we're gonna run it directly on our laptop
just like any other software application,
the Dynamips is a critical component.
That is the emulator,
that's the thing that's taking that Cisco
software image that you're using
and making the software image believe
that it's really sitting inside of a router.
Dynamips is the emulation engine
that emulates the router.
Without it, the software image wouldn't do anything.
Cisco's software just running on your laptop,
you can't open it, you can't run it,
because your laptop isn't a router.
Dynamips makes the software believe
it's operating within a router,
so you gotta have that.
QEMU stands for Quick Emulator.
Quick Emulator, and as you can see here in the description,
a very useful thing for this is
if you're using an adaptive security appliance.
So if you're studying for your
CCNA security or you CCNP security,
you're gonna have to know about
adaptive security appliances and firewalls and stuff.
And that doesn't come with GNS3 by default
so to get those sort of security appliances,
those firewalls, you have to run them with QEMU.
And QEMU is installed by default as you can see here.
VPCS, very useful.
As you can see, it's the virtual PC simulator.
Lot of useful things you can do.
So you can build a GNS3 topolgy of routers and switches
and then drag and drop these virtual PCs in there.
And they're not running a full blown version
of Windows or anything like that.
As a matter of fact, there's no GUI
in these virtual PCs at all.
But what you can do is you can have them
start up TCP streams and UDP streams
and ping back and forth and do all kinds of
really sort of cool stuff with them
to test out your network,
to see if your network is operating
the way you thought it would operate.
So it's a great that's built in here.
CPU Limit. I actually have something to talk about that.
Here is CPU Limit.
So this comes directly from cpulimit.sourceforge.net
so just real simple explanation,
just like it sounds.
It's an application, it's a program
which attempts to limit the CPU usage
of whatever application's using it.
So in GNS3 is using CPU Limit,
it limits the amount of CPU.
So that's pretty clear there.
So what else do we get?
In addition to that, well, there's GNS3 itself.
That's the whole reason why you're here.
SuperPuTTY is an example of a terminal emulator.
Now this comes packaged in with GNS3.
If you're wondering what is a terminal emulator,
well, the terminal emulator is the software
that gives you the command line.
So for example, in order to get into
the command line interface of a router or a switch
so you can see your commands and type in your commands,
the software, the front end that's giving you that window,
is called a terminal emulator.
And there's lots of different applications
that are terminal emulators. SuperPuTTY is one.
HyperTerminal is one you may have heard of.
SecureCRT is another one.
So by default, GNS3 uses PuTTy.
But if you prefer SecureCRT or HyperTerminal
or something like that,
I'll show you in an upcoming video
how you can change GNS3 to use the terminal
emulator that you want to use.
And then lastly we have TightVNC Viewer right here.
I'm not really gonna into great detail on that.
That's definitely more of an intermediate/advanced topic.
But this is basically a way that
if you have GNS3 running on one system
and you're on a different system,
maybe across town or across the state or something
you can still bring up the GUI on your system
even though the actual GNS3 server
is running on a different laptop or different server
that's physically different than
the one that you are on right now.
So TightVNV Viewer allows you to do that.
So we're just gonna go ahead and install
all that stuff and click Next.
And let it install into the default
directory where it wants to go.
Alright now, right now I'm getting a little warning saying,
hey, WinPcap is already on this machine.
In this case, I'm just gonna cancel out of it.
Now if you don't get this,
remember you definitely want WinPcap to be installed
but my case, I've already got it right here,
so I'm just gonna cancel out of that
'cause I don't need it to be installed
or overwritten what I've already got.
Now same thing. Wireshark.
If I sat around here for like a minute or two,
it would download Wireshark.
But I'm gonna cancel that
because I've already got Wiresharked installed.
I don't need to install it again.
SolarWinds Response Time Viewer, once again,
I'm gonna cancel out of that because I already have it,
I downloaded it prior to this video.
So, I'm gonna abort that installation.
And now it's just gonna download everything else.
All that other goo stuff that I need.
And as you can see, doesn't take a whole long time.
And that's it.
Next.
Now you're prompted, would you like to get to get
your free license of the SolarWinds standard tool set?
Hey, definitely wanna click Yes here
because as you can see it's a $200 value,
you get it for free, hey, why not, right?
And now when you click Next,
it'll actually bring up
the SolarWinds website here where you can register
to get that free tool set.
I'm not gonna do that right now.
And then lastly prompts you to start GNS3.
You'll be directed to the GNS3 welcome page
where they kindly give you their gratitude
for downloading the software,
and at this point, we are now into
what's called the GNS3 Setup Wizard.
Now I'm gonna go into that in the next couple of videos.
I'm gonna walk you through step by step
of how to use the setup wizard
and what your various options are.
But this point, we have successfully located
the GNS3 software on the internet on the GNS3 website,
we have downloaded it to our laptop,
and we have begun the installation process.