Create Your Own Network Assessment Appliance: Additional Tools

Introduction

I previously did a write up on a personal virtual machine I like to keep at hand for performing network analysis and discovery. I’ve since added a few tools to the VM and documented how they were installed so I figured I’d share on how it was done. Even if you don’t setup everything in this post it may be worthwhile to glance through it for some network engineering tools which are free to setup and use but not highly publicized. Anyone who cares to read this post has likely heard of Solarwinds but I highly doubt you have heard of all the tools in this list (let alone how to set them up). Regardless, I’ll start with a tool anyone worth their salt has heard of though, Cacti…

Virtual Connect: Cisco MDS 9500 Fiber Connectivity

I’ve done quite a bit of work with HP’s Virtual Connect  and C7000 blade enclosures in a contained (almost pure HP) environment. Today I ran into an issue which flummoxed both myself and an on-site engineer while attempting to connect the VC 8gb interconnect bays to the Cisco MDS fiber module for an upcoming (and exciting!) VMAX implementation.

GNS3 on Ubuntu 8.04 – Migrating Your Install

Don’t have much time due to work obligations but I wanted to quickly drop this one out there for any who have followed my install guides. I was always ragging on and on about making the install somewhat portable by putting it into the /opt/ directory and now I’ll give a good example why.

GNS3 on Ubuntu 8.04 – Choosing and Using your IOS

As promised here is the post regarding choosing and using an IOS image that will fit your study needs.

If you followed the first post in this series you are technically now ready to start loading up images and making labs of your own. You will need to get your hands on some IOS images (legally of course).But which IOS should you use?

GNS3 on Ubuntu 8.04 – Install Guide

GNS3 is a frontend for dynagen (which is a scripting language for dynamips). Getting it to work nicely in Ubuntu was a bit of a pain in the arse but I was able to get it to work in a manner I’m happy with. This setup will essentially encapsulate a large portion of the install to one directory in /opt. Some libraries and executables will be installed through apt though, but not many. I previously wrote part of a writeup for this on Ubuntu 7.10, I’d ignore that in favor of this one which is much more up to date and polished.