(electronic music)
- So, welcome back.
In this particular video we're gonna continue
our investigation into the GNS3 application
by looking at some of the other toolbars,
and we're gonna continue building a topology
and getting some of this stuff to work.
So, that being the case,
let's go ahead and get started.
So, I'm starting, once again, with a clean slate.
And just to make things simple,
we're just gonna start with creating a topology
with routers, nothing but routers.
So, let's just do a simple topology of three routers.
Now, remember what I said?
That when I drag and drop something,
if I hold down the Shift button,
I can, actually, do more than one.
So, I'll just do 3 routers.
So, there we go, so, I got a total of four.
I'll just make a nice topology out of that.
Okay, so, I got four routers.
Now, first thing to note is look on the upper-right corner
where it says Topology Summary.
What is this telling us?
Well, every device listed here is gonna have
one of two different colors.
Actually, it can be one of three.
A red means it's not doing anything; it's stopped.
It's sort of like you unplugged it,
and it's not powered in at all.
When you turn the router on,
and I'll just go ahead and do that.
And I'll talk more about turning it on in just a second.
Then notice it turns green.
So, you'll see, most likely, red or green.
Sometimes what you will see is yellow.
Yellow is usually a transitory situation.
So, usually like something's wrong;
it's trying to start, but there's some problem.
I haven't seen that a whole lot.
And usually when it does turn yellow,
usually if I just wait a few minutes,
it'll sort itself out and it will turn green.
If it doesn't, if just stays in the yellow state,
what I would recommend is just right-click on that router,
that particular router, delete it;
and then try to drag and drop a new one in.
And, hopefully, that will rectify the situation.
So, right now it shows me I've got four devices,
three of which are stopped, not running at all,
one of which is running.
Now, also, something I want you to note.
As you drag and drop these routers in there,
notice that by default it names them R1, R2, R3, R4.
They're just named in the order
in which you dragged them in.
You can change these names if you want to.
Now, changing the name is just gonna change the name
on the topology diagram.
It's not, actually, gonna change
the hostname of the router.
You would still have to log into the router to do that.
But I can change the name here.
But I wanna show you something.
Let's compare the difference.
First of all, I'm gonna change the name
of a router that's not running.
So, R2 is currently red.
So, I would right-click on R2,
and the second item down is Change hostname.
So, I just select that.
And I'll just type in San-Jose and hit OK.
And it changes the name, no problem.
Now, what if I tried doing that to R1
who is currently running?
Change hostname.
How about San-Francisco?
Notice it does not change the name,
and down here in this bottom window...
I'll see if I can display that for you a little bit.
There you go.
It, actually, says Server error:
unable to rename VM instance R1.
So, the takeaway from this is that
there is no way to change the name
of a router once you've started it.
So, if you wanna change the name,
remember, it's the displayed name here in the topology,
you have to stop that router
and then change the name while it is stopped.
And then it will let me change it.
I'm gonna leave the other two as they are.
Okay, and also one other thing I wanted to mention.
So, that other window I just referred to
down there at the bottom.
Down here, the Console window.
Most likely, you're probably not
gonna need that for anything.
Now, don't let this get you confused.
When it says Console window here,
this does not mean, "Oh, that must be the window
"I go into to issue my iOS commands
"like hostname, and enable password, and IP address."
No, that's not what that window is for.
That Console window allows you to provide
command-line commands to the GNS3 application itself.
It's sort of like a window where you would type in
DOS commands for your laptop, or something.
Chances are you probably don't know any
of the GNS3 commands to type in here,
and you probably won't need to.
So, this is usually when you're doing
some sort of troubleshooting,
and trying to figure out on the backend
what's going on with the GNS3 software,
something weird is happening.
So, the only time I can really see you needing
to go in there and type something
is if you're working with like a GNS3 developer,
and they, actually, tell you
what commands to type in there,
and they wanna see what output comes out.
But just for a regular GNS3 user
who's trying to work with this,
the Console window, really, isn't gonna do you much good.
You're not really gonna do anything there.
It's really just gonna be there
to show you if there's errors.
That's really what you'd be looking for
in that particular case.
You're not really gonna type anything in there.
Okay, so, another thing I wanna show you,
in this particular case.
So, so far, we've looked at the devices toolbar on the left.
We've looked at the main workspace in the center.
We've talked about the Topology Summary in the right,
which is really just used to show you
what devices are currently on
and what devices are off.
We've looked at the Console window,
which we don't really need to pay that much attention to.
And the last thing I wanna show you right here
is this window right here.
The Servers Summary window.
What this is used for is to tell you
how much of your current CPU and memory
is being consumed by GNS3.
Now, right now you can see not a whole lot.
My CPU is not being used by this
because, really, nothing's running.
I think all of my routers right now are turned off,
so there's, really, almost no CPU usage being used by this.
Now, RAM 54.9%.
You might be thinkin', "Wait a second!
"Why is half of my RAM already being used
"when nothing's been turned on, yet?"
This is, actually, showing you sort of all the RAM you have.
Not only the RAM that's being used by GNS3,
but any other open windows you have, or anything like that.
Which leads me to a very good point.
Ideally, when you're using GNS3,
in an ideal world, you're gonna close down
all the other applications on your laptop.
Because, remember, everything you have open,
every tab you have open in your browser,
your email program, your instant-messaging program;
they're all consuming memory,
vital memory that you're gonna need for these routers.
Because, remember, each one of these routers
when you open it up is gonna take somewhere
between, like, 128 megabytes, if you're lucky,
all the way up to 512 megabytes
for some of the 7200 Series images.
So, that's gonna eat up your RAM really, really quickly.
So, right now this is showing,
you know, I've got, like, four different windows open
of Google Chrome right now.
I've, also, got email open, Outlook.
I've, also, got a chat program open.
So, right now, without GNS3 really doing anything,
already 54.9% of my memory is already used.
And once I start up these routers,
let's see how that's going to affect things.
Which brings me to my next point.
How do I start up a router?
Well, there's two ways you can do it.
One way is just take a router and right-click on it.
And you'll see here that if you scroll down
about, oh I don't know, 10 or 11 icons down,
is the Start button.
You can just click on that.
And then if it successfully starts,
it'll turn green over here.
The other way you can do it
is up in the top here, in the GNS toolbar...
If you take a look at this if I zoom in.
This says Start or Resume all devices.
So, if you press that, and I'll go ahead and do that,
all of your routers, actually, everything that's in there
will turn on.
Now, by doing that, how did that affect
my CPU and my RAM usage?
Let's see if I can get over there.
Come on, I'm using two screens,
so it's being difficult.
All right, let's do this.
I don't know if you can see it or not,
but right now it says my Local CPU,
it's, actually, pretty good.
It's fluctuating between 2.5 and 4%.
My RAM has gone up a little bit.
Previously, it was like 59% of my RAM was used;
and now 65.3% of my RAM is used.
In case you're wondering, this particular laptop I'm using
has a total of eight gigs of RAM.
So, between everything I have open right now,
65.3% is in use.
Let me just go ahead and shut down
some of my other applications that I don't need right now,
and see how that affects my RAM usage.
So, I just shut down my instant-messaging program.
That just shaved off two percentage points of RAM.
Now I'm gonna shut down everything I have for Google Chrome.
So, that's shut down.
So, that knocked off quite a bit.
Almost 10 percentage points of RAM, right there.
And as far as network devices, that's pretty much it.
I've, also, got PowerPoint open,
which, actually, consumes a lot of RAM;
so, let me go ahead and disable that.
So, now PowerPoint is closing.
So, it's from 52.9, or 53, we now go down to what?
All right, so, that saved a little bit,
not as much as I expected.
So, it's now down to 52%.
And I've, also, got a Microsoft Word document
that's open right now.
I'll go ahead and shut that down.
All right, and I've got Microsoft Outlook up, as well;
let's shut that down.
So, at this point, the only thing I have open and running
is GNS3 itself with four routers
that are currently up and active.
And you can see, hopefully you can see.
Let me see if I can zoom in on this a little bit.
You can see currently with four routers running,
and no other applications,
it's using slightly over 1% of my CPU,
and about 47% of my RAM.
Not too bad.
So, as far as this button up here play, or Start all,
if you've got like I've got here three or four routers,
not a big deal to start 'em all.
But if you've got larger topologies
of, like, seven, eight, nine plus routers,
probably don't wanna use the Start all button.
I haven't, actually, experienced this myself,
but I've read a lot of websites and documents
that said people, actually, did have problems
with their laptop when they tried to start
lots of devices simultaneously.
So, I would say, as a general rule of thumb,
if you've got six or more devices,
it's probably better to just right-click on them
one at a time and start them up,
rather than starting them all at the same time.
Now, how do I stop a device?
Same type of thing.
Right-click on it, and then if I scroll down here,
you can see there is a the Stop button;
and that will stop it.
Or I could go up here to the red box
and stop everything all at once.
And now it's stopped.
So, that's pretty easy.
We, also, talked already about how
to do connections between these guys.
So, let me just go ahead and set up
some FastEthernet connections between them.
Maybe a Serial connection between these two guys.
Another Serial connection between these two guys.
And we'll just leave it like that,
and then press my link button again to stop that.
Now, one other thing about links that I wanna mention
is that unlike real physical routers,
now let's think about this.
If you've ever had any practice connecting
real physical routers together,
or actually like in a remote lab, or something,
one of the things you've experienced,
and you haven't a CCNA on-up will test you on this,
is that when you have a back-to-back
Serial connection between routers,
one of those routers is acting as a DCE,
and the other is a DTE.
And what does that mean?
That means the DCE-side is providing the heartbeat,
or like what we call a clock-rate,
that the DTE-side needs to lock onto.
So, when I've got a real back-to-back cable
between two physical routers,
one of them that's the DCE-side
has to be configured with the clock-rate command.
Otherwise that interface either won't come up at all,
or it'll flap,
go up, down, up, down.
Well, here in GNS3, you don't have to do that.
As soon as I start these routers,
I can just no-shut those interfaces
without inserting any clock-rate command, and it'll work.
I've actually seen the GNS3, actually, it puts in
a clock-rate by default on both sides of the Serial link.
But even if you take that clock-rate out,
no problem because it'll just come right up, no worries.
Also, everything you see here like the names,
they can be dragged.
So, if they're currently in the way,
you can drag them out of the way.
Now, you might be looking at this and saying,
"Okay, but one thing that's sort of confusing here
"is I don't know which interface
"is connecting to which interface.
"Is this FastEthernet0/0, or 0/1, or something else?"
Well, here's a real quick and easy way to figure that out.
Up here in the toolbar at the very top,
notice this one right here, if I hover over it,
says Show/Hide Interface labels.
So, if I click no that, the interface names get displayed.
Now, some of 'em don't line up very well, that's okay.
Just drag and drop it into place,
so it's a little bit more visually appealing.
So, you're definitely gonna wanna do that.
Click on that Show Interfaces button
to keep track in your mind
which interface is connected to which interface.
What else can you do from here?
All right, another thing I wanna show you.
A lot of times to make the topology more visually exciting,
more visually illustrative of what you want,
you wanna draw, like, circles and squares
to represent, like, OSPF areas,
BGP autonomous systems, stuff like that.
So, how would you do that?
Well, that's here in this upper area.
So, this right here draws a rectangle.
So, if I click on it, and then click anywhere
on my white space, there's a rectangle.
And then I can just, sort of like in PowerPoint,
I can drag it and reshape it.
Now, notice that by default, the shape,
you know, think about this like in,
if you have any experience with Microsoft PowerPoint,
you know that as you put things on top of things,
some of the stuff underneath can disappear.
PowerPoint has this idea of layers, right,
where if you have a shape,
and then you put something else on it,
the other thing will be on the top layer
and this will be on the bottom layer.
But with Microsoft PowerPoint,
you can do, like, the Send Backward,
or Bring Forward option to change the layers.
Well, you can do the same thing right here.
Like right now, you say, "Hey, where are my links?"
Well, the links are still there,
but they're underneath the square; we can't see them.
So, what we wanna do, is we wanna swap 'em around.
We wanna take this square here and lower it one layer,
so that the links are on top of it,
and we can see that.
So, just on the square itself right-click,
and select Lower one layer.
And now it's gonna give you just a little notification.
It's gonna say, "Now you're gonna have to right-click
"on this to bring it up again if you want to move it."
See, now that's on a lower layer, I can't,
well, actually I can move it, which is kind of interesting.
It is movable, so, that might be an old message.
But there it is.
And I can, also, put in an ellipse, or a circle.
And just like the square, I can modify the shape of that.
And notice right now that that's something new;
so, that ended up on the top layers,
now overlaying the circle.
And I wanna lower that one layer.
There we go.
What are some other things that you can do?
We know that by default when you save,
anytime you do File, Save Project,
it creates a picture of this, a PNG file.
But let's say, for example,
whatever reason you didn't wanna save it right now,
but you did wanna create a picture.
All right, very easy.
Right here, this button, Take a screenshot.
So, I'll just click that.
And now it's asking me,
"Where do I wanna put the screenshot?"
So, I'll just save it as Current-topology.
And I'll save it to my Desktop.
And then I can Save it.
So, that's just another way of creating a screenshot
of your workspace right there.
So, that's to create a screenshot.
As you can see, these buttons,
like it sounds like,
zoom in, or zoom out to allow you to move around.
You've got some scrollbars here if you wanna center
things a little bit better.
And there's a few more things I wanna show you on here.
So, what else can we talk about?
Okay, so, let's start up my routers, as an example.
I'll just Start 'em all
because I've only got four routers here to begin with.
Okay, so, they're all started at this point.
Now, the moment of truth.
How do I actually configure these things?
I mean, I did all this because I wanna practice
the Cisco iOS command-line.
So, how do I do that?
Well, there's a couple of ways you can do this.
Now, by default, GNS3 defaults to using Putty
as its terminal, as its terminal applications.
So, with Putty, every time you click on a router,
or an EtherSwitch router,
it's gonna bring up a new Putty window.
And, so, you're gonna end up with potentially lots
of Putty windows that you're gonna have to navigate around.
In my particular case,
I've already changed it in the background to use SecureCRT,
so I can have tab-ability.
And I'll show you in another video,
it's real quick to do that,
but I'll show you in another video how to do that.
So, basically, to get to your Console,
you can do one of two things.
You can double-click on a router.
There we go.
And notice how fast it is.
I mean, there it is.
I mean, if that was a real Cisco router
and you powered it on,
you'd be looking at three to four minutes
of just sitting there and twiddling your thumbs
while the iOS came up fully.
But, remember, you already decompressed this image
when you inserted it into GNS3;
so, that speeded up this whole process.
So, here we are on the router.
And notice like what I said before,
what I said earlier.
Even though when I right-clicked on the router
and I renamed it, see here's the name of the router,
but it did not, actually, change the hostname of the router.
It still has the default hostname of Router.
So, by changing the hostname by right-clicking,
that just changed the topology image;
it didn't actually change anything else.
So, that's one way you can get into the router
is by double-clicking on it.
There's two more ways you can do it.
You can right-click on it.
And if you right-click on it,
now hold on a sec, you might think,
"Oh, Configure, that's what I want."
No, that's not what that is.
That Configure button, if you select that,
brings up this.
For example, you said, "Oh, when I put in this 3725,
"I actually wanted to put some wics in there,
"and I forgot to do that."
Or, "I wanna change the amount of memory it's using."
Or, you know, "Change the image pathing."
You probably don't wanna do any of that stuff.
So, it's not Config; that's not what you want.
When you right-click on it,
you wanna go to Console, Console.
And then select that.
And that will bring up your Console.
So, I said there were three ways;
so, far I've shown you two of them.
Double-clicking the router, right-clicking it
and selecting Console,
and then if you have, like I said,
a fairly small topology like this,
remember how I said you could start
all the routers at one time with this green arrow
and you could stop all the routers at one time
with the red square?
Well, guess what, this little icon right here,
if I zoom in on that,
Console connect to all devices.
If I press that, it will bring up a Console window
to every single device that I have simultaneously.
And because I'm using SecureCRT,
and I've got set up for tabs,
there they are.
They all came up at the same time.
And now I can start doing my lab work at this point.
I can start configuring and doing whatever I want.
And then when I'm done, just hit File,
Save project, save the current state,
and I'll be finished.
Now, certainly there's a few more things
I intend to show you in this video series,
but at this point, if you just stopped right here
and you walked away,
you should be able to create a basic topology
of routers connected via either Ethernet or Serial.
You know how to start them, you know how to stop them.
You know how to open up Console windows
to get in there and start configuring.
And, at this point, you're good to go.
But what are some things you don't know?
Well, some of the things I'm gonna show you
in the future videos are number one, switches.
How do I insert switches into this topology,
and what are my various options?
I'll talk about that.
What about LAN-switching?
For example, at the CCNA and the CCNP level,
they want you to know about frame relay.
And, so, you're gonna wanna get experience
with Cisco iOS commands that relate to frame relay,
which means you're gonna need a frame relay switch.
How do I do that?
So, those and a lot of other stuff
are things I'm gonna talk about in videos
coming up in just a moment.
(electronic music)