Randy's Work Blog

I was easily able to run two 7200s on my MacBook Pro, though it is fairly beefy for a laptop, having 8G RAM etc. It turns out that the Dynagen needs to be told to use RAM as opposed to disk, e.g.
mmap = false

The two routers could easily run IS-IS and BGP between them.

One can configure just about any kind of interface, so one can emulate a real configuration.

It is easy to connect to the outside world, just do something in the family of
[[ROUTER R1]]
f0/0 = NIO_gen_eth:en0
(any interface will do), and then configure the specified interface on the router for a real IP on your local LAN and it just bridges out. Note that this did not seem to work when my Mac was on WiFi, only on Ethernet. I suspect it has something to do with the MacOS X’s WiFi, the dreaded proxy ARP, and bridging. But I really did not take the time to debug it. I imagine hard-wired Ethernet will still be around for a year or two.

This allowed me to trivially multi-hop BGP peer with one of my real routers, r0.sea, the 7200 in the Westin. But, if I configured R1 as a 7200 with an NPE-400 and 512MB of RAM, it would crash before it loaded a full feed. If I configured it as an NPE-G2, G1 is not available, the configuration would not come up in Dynagen, and crashed out. While I am not sure I need a full feed to my MacBook :), it would be nice for certain things.

All in all, this looks like a cool tool, and I plan to keep it around.

Thanks to pfs, I am using Dynamips/Dynagen to have multiple virtual Ciscos on my MacBookPro.

Dynagen Web Site

Kit for MacOS X

The native Emacs seemed not to have a meta key.  While this might be fine for amateurs, it is definitely not fine for hard-core Emacs users. The lack of meta seemed to be the case irrespective of whether it was under MacOS or under X11.  I kept tweaking my .Xmodmap to no avail.

The general advice on the net was to install 22.1 using MacPorts.  So I went down that path.  MacPorts installed, though it required XTools, which was a bit of a pig.  Then I build 22.1.  It did not seem to support the meta key!

A co-worker who was also at the APNIC meeting in Taipei said just install Carbon Emacs.  So I Googled it and installed it, and it worked under X11 and native MacOs.

Of course, now i want to rip out MacTools etc., but am not sure how to do so safely.

On the Sunday before NANOG, 17 February, an old acquaintance, Tom Pusateri stopped me and told me he had a start-up doing a new network device management appl,ication and did I want to be in the alpha test crew. As Tom had done such a great job on the Juniper configuration system, and done the netconf XML stuff in the IETF, I could not resist. Unfortunately, it was only going to run on the Macintosh, at least initially. So Monday, Joel drove me to the Apple Store a few miles away, and I got a 15″ MacBookPro to run Tom’s software.

I spent much of my spare time on Monday and Monday evening learning how to deal with the Mac. Why did they have to ‘add value’ to FreeBSD? I did manage to get enough tools installed that I could survive. A gang of Internet2 folk at NANOG were very helpful, as was Joel as usual.

Tuesday, I installed NetCannery, Tom’s application, and Tom got me started. Think of RANCID with an analytic back end. But it was clearly early in the development cycle.

The config fetcher has open source front ends for common devices, e.g. Cisco, Juniper, etc. So you can add strange new devices. And it is smart about bastion hosts, where you need to log into a control host to get to the device. But it did not have a bulk loader, which will be very necessary for any non-trivial networks. When I suggested this, Tom understood immediately and promised it for the near future.

I managed to fetch from a Cisco 7206 and some 2511s, but failed on a 1750 with VoIP. It worked for Juniper M5s, but not for a Procket 8801 or for HP ProCurve or SMC switches. Of course, Tom will fix that.

It lacked ways to group devices, e.g. North America, New York, PoP X, and type of device, e.g. infrastructure, backbone, customer-facing, etc. When I pointed this out, Tom and his friends discussed and came back with the idea of ‘smart’ folders. Not being a recent Mac person, I am not sure I understand the metaphor. So we’ll see how that turns out.