Friday, June 17, 2011

Router testbed with JunOS olive on Virtualbox

I did an SRX course earlier in the week and we got to use Olive virtual machines to play with what we had learned. I'd tried making my own but got into trouble when actually installing the package, so I took a copy of this olive (8.3) and tried to get it to work at home. The first results were less than ideal - they would run fine without crashing, but setting addresses had to be done on the commandline with ifconfig rather than in the interfaces stanza. Not only this, but routing was totally broken - not even OSPF would work!

I had read that JunOS 9 didn't suffer from this, and tonight I acquired a copy of JunOS 9.6. The upgrade went smoothly (needed a force as the leftover diskspace wasn't enough, but it installed fine) and it automatically picked up the addresses from the interfaces stanza. OSPF worked fine between 4 of them, so the next thing was to use BGP to set up a basic layer 3 topology with 3 routers all with a single peering with the router in the middle.

If you've done JunOS BGP before then you'll know this is trivial - I made my life easier by making the export policy take routes from direct, local and bgp (which means readvertising happens automatically). The point of this testbed was simply to check my connectivity.

It did all work in the end, and now I'm on to part two - testing out multicast. The plan is to get a couple of virtual interfaces on a real machine, set up multicast between the routers, and have each virtual interface on a subnet owned by a different router. They're all connected to the same bridged interface which means the layer 2 topology has everything effectively hanging off the same switch, so this will be successful if I can get multicasts happening between the different subnets. This is somewhat trivial though, and the next step is to get IPv6 connectivity and testbed IPv6 multicast - if it works, then I'll put up some detailed instructions of all the ins and outs!

1 comment:

  1. Hi there,

    This is an an ancient post but I'm wondering if you ever found a way to get IPv6 up cleanly on GNS3/virtualbox.

    I'm currently trying, and have the issue that I add a v6 address to my config, but it doesn't show up on the interface or in the routes.. thats with the em1 interface. Loopback works.

    I am using Bridged and 82545EM adapter in VB

    Thx!!

    Any ideas?

    Thanks

    B

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