The Little Things

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 nicely.

Start by getting the right packages for it to work correctly:
sudo apt-get install dynagen python-qt4

Now get GNS3, extract it, remove the tar.gz and put the whole thing into opt for portability
cd ~
wget http://pfe.epitech.net/frs/download.php/597/GNS3-0.3.2-src.tar.gz
tar xzvf GNS3-0.3.2-src.tar.gz && rm GNS3-0.3.2-src.tar.gz
sudo mv GNS3-0.3.2 /opt/GNS3
sudo chown -R username.username /opt/GNS3
cd /opt/GNS3

Get the dynamips binary, make it executable, then make a link to it (for some reason GNS3 only wanted to work on a link):

wget http://www.ipflow.utc.fr/dynamips/dynamips-0.2.8-RC2-x86.bin
ln -s dynamips-0.2.8-RC2-x86.bin ./dynamips && chmod +x ./dynamips-0.2.8-RC2-x86.bin

When you set the path to dynamips in the preferences of gns3 it will not be able to find the binary for some reason. You have to manually type the path to the application (including the application name) like this:

/opt/GNS3/dynamips

Then press enter to make it stick. You can then add a cache area as well so your GNS3 directory doesn’t get cluttered up by nvram cache files and logs.
mkdir Cache

My configuration looks something like the following picture. The terminal setting is important as well it should be:
gnome-terminal -t %d -e 'telnet %h %p' > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Ok, we are half way there. In the next part to this I will cover adding ios images (that you own) to this install and how to get them to not consume 100% of your processor (so that you can run more complicated labs)