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- So at this point, I'm assuming
that you downloaded the GNS3 executable file,
the application, and you've also downloaded
at least one Cisco IOS software image.
So now we're going to open up that executable file
from GNS3, and I'm going to go through something
called the Setup Wizard, which is a series of steps
you have to go through to get GNS3 fully up and working.
Now there's actually quite a lot to talk about
during the setup phase here, so I'm going
to divide this into two videos, and this is going
to be part one of that series.
So let's start with unpacking that executable,
or that GNS3 file.
So in my particular case,
I've downloaded GNS3,
right here to this GNS3 file,
and you can see I've got various flavors of it.
As of this recording, version 1.4.4
is the most recent version of GNS3.
So I'm just going to go ahead and double click on that.
And that brings me to the very first page
of the GNS3 setup wizard, so I'll click on Next,
I will agree to the license, and I will let GNS3 install
where it wants to.
Okay, so here's where we're going
to spend a little bit of time.
If you are like me, and when you get something like this
that wants to install a bunch of stuff onto your system,
you might want to know what all of these things are,
and if they're mandatory, and what they do.
So let me just spend a little bit of time
talking about each one of these things.
Let's start with WinPcap.
WinPcap is simply a driver.
It connects to your NIC card, and it allows your NIC card
to capture every single Ethernet frame it sees,
and then send those Ethernet frames to some sort
of application, like maybe WireShark, or some other kind
of packet sniffing application.
So it puts your NIC card into what's called
promiscuous mode.
Without WinPcap, your sniffing program wouldn't do anything.
It wouldn't be able to capture anything.
Or I should say, it would only be able to capture files
that are sent to you, in other words, Ethernet frames
are sent directly to your laptop in broadcast frames.
Any other Ethernet frames that your Ethernet card sees,
it normally ignores those frames, it discards them.
Well, with WinPcap, it has the ability
to actually collect everything it sees,
and then send it to Wireshark.
Wireshark is a packet-sniffing tool.
If you've never actually seen Wireshark before,
this is an example of what it looks like.
After you've done a capture, you can see
every single frame that your NIC card has collected.
And you can open up these things,
you can see every single field within every single header.
And this is a great, useful tool when you're learning
about networking protocols.
You know, there's no better way to learn about
how OSPF works, or how RIP works,
than by actually seeing the packets capturing them
and seeing every single field in there,
seeing when a packet generates or triggers
another packet in response.
And a packet-sniffing tool like Wireshark,
and there are others out there as well,
is a great tool to do that.
Now along with this, when you capture your files,
now you might be wondering, well, what's Wireshark
have to do with GNS3?
Because GNS3 is creating a virtual networking topology.
I'm not dealing with real routers with real cables here.
Well the nice thing about this is because GNS3 is bundled
in, I should say Wireshark is bundled
into the GNS3 download.
Once you create your virtual topology of your routers,
connected via serial interfaces or Ethernet interfaces
or whatever they are, you can right click on any router,
I'll show you how to do this,
and there's a "Capture" option.
You select which interface you want,
you could capture off of serial interfaces if you want to.
And then it actually captures all the packets
on that interface and displays them in Wireshark.
Now where this is really, totally cool and useful is,
you know, imagine you had real routers in a real lab,
and they were all cabled up via Ethernet
or serial interfaces.
How would you actually capture packets in that environment?
Well one way is, you'd have to purchase a hub,
an Ethernet hub, install it in between two routers,
connect your PC to that hub, and then your PC
would have the ability to see all the packets
going back and forth between those routers.
That's great if you're talking about Ethernet.
But what if I want to capture stuff on a serial link,
like if I want to see what frame relay headers look like,
or what PPP headers look like.
Can't do that with a hub.
Kinda hard with a back-to-back serial cable
to capture that stuff.
But here, in the GNS3 virtual environment,
it's so easy to do so.
Now the other thing you're going to want to do is,
once you capture your various files, you're going
to want to save them, just click File and Save As,
and the reason for that is because
you will see here, in addition to Wireshark,
the GNS3 application downloads these SolarWinds
response time viewer.
And what that does is with that tool, you can import
your capture file that you got from Wireshark,
and then click on Analyze,
it just takes a couple of moments here,
and what this does is it takes all the traffic
that Wireshark created and sorts it and categorizes it
by different high-level categories you can see here.
And if you highlight one of these, or if you just
actually mouse over it, you can see you get
a lot more detailed information
about the average network response time,
the average application response time,
so this is also a really great tool to just get
a high-level snapshot of what's going on
not only in your virtual environment,
but you can use this in a real network as well
to see, what's going on in my network?
Is there stuff going across my cable
that I didn't expect to be there?
So the SolarWinds response time viewer
is a great tool for that purpose.
In addition to that, you get Dynamips,
have to have Dynamips.
Dynamips is the engine that creates your emulated router,
so that's gotta be in there.
And then you've got Qemu.
I'm not really going to talk about Qemu,
that's really for people who like virtualizing,
using a virtual machine, like if you want to have
GNS3 running with VM ware or Virtual Box or something,
then this whole Qemu thing gets involved,
but I'm not going to go into that
in this basic tutorial video right here.
Now the next thing, but you will want to include,
don't uncheck it, just leave Qemu checked as it is,
cause later on you might want to use that in your studies,
VPCS, awesome tool.
This stands for the Virtual PC Simulator.
So when you create your network topology within GNS3
of your routers connected to each other,
you might want to have some PCs connected to those routers.
For example, maybe you need something to generate traffic,
maybe UDP traffic or TCP traffic, or ICMP traffic,
going through those routers, because you want that traffic
to go through the routers, and maybe you want to test out
your access list to see if they're actually working
as you expect.
Or you want to test out your quality of service policies
to see if they're working as you expect.
Well VPCS, the Virtual PC Simulator,
is a great tool for doing that.
You can just drop these virtual PCs into your network,
connect them to your routers, and on the virtual PCs
you can tell them, start a UDP traffic stream,
start a TCP traffic stream, and you can select
the port numbers and all kinds of stuff,
which is a great tool for testing simple stuff
in your GNS3 virtual topology.
So fortunately for us, that is built in.
CPUlimit is just a little program that, like it sounds,
it sort of helps GNS3 to work with your CPU
so it doesn't consume too many CPU resources.
Then of course, you have the GNS3 application itself,
gotta have that in there.
And it also comes bundled in with SuperPutty.
Now, when you're working with the Cisco IOS command line,
you have to have some application
to display that command line,
we call that a terminal application.
And there's lots of terminal applications out there,
but SuperPutty is one example of a terminal application.
It comes bundled in here with GNS3.
Now if you are used to using
a different terminal server application,
like, for example, HyperTerminal or SecureCRT,
or something, you can.
GNS3 does give you the flexibility
to use whatever terminal application you want,
it's just that it defaults to Putty.
And then lastly, there's TightVNC Viewer,
and that's more of an advanced topic,
I'm not going to get into the details of that.
So let's just go ahead and let it default all this stuff,
and I'll click Next, and I'll let it default to the,
with the file that it wants to, the folder.
Now in this particular case, the text that,
WinPcap is already running on my machine,
it's already installed on my machine, so I don't need
to install it again, but if you don't get this message,
you definitely want to have WinPcap installed
on your laptop.
So for example, if you've never used Wireshark before,
you've never had a reason to sniff Ethernet frames
or packets, you might not have WinPcap on your laptop,
and you might need to install it.
In this case, I'm going to cancel out of it.
And right now, it's downloading Wireshark.
I'm going to cancel out of Wireshark right here,
gonna quit, and I'm going to cancel out of this
because I already have Wireshark, I don't need
to download it, so I'll abort that.
I also already have the response time viewer,
I just showed you an example of that.
So I'll just cancel out of that as well
just to speed things up here for this video.
And then now it's downloading everything else,
which will be pretty quick.
And in just a moment here we should be,
there we go, setup was completed successfully.
And now I click Next, and now I have the option
to get a free license of the SolarWinds standard tool set.
You're definitely going to want this, lots of tools
available for free, which is awesome,
so you want to click Yes, and then when you hit Next,
you'll actually bring up a web browser,
or a new tab in your web browser, that allows you
to go to the SolarWinds website and register
for that free license, which will then be emailed to you.
And then lastfully, we can start GNS
by hitting the Finish button here.
So at this point, I'm going to go ahead
and stop this video right here.
This concludes part one of the setup.
And in part two of the setup, the next video,
I'm going to click the Finish button here
and we're going to see what the next steps are
to, for example, import Cisco IOS into GNS
so it has something it can work with.
So we'll see that in the next section.
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