Mininet VM with Vagrant

Install Vagrant, and run the VM with vagrant up!

Usage

• Install Vagrant. If you are using Homebrew on macOS, you can simply run brew install vagrant. If you haven't already, you will also need to install VirtualBox as the provider for your VM.

  EDIT: Unfortunately the official Ubuntu box only works with VirtualBox.

• Clone/download this repo and cd into the directory.

• Run vagrant up. This should set up your VM in a few minutes.

• Run vagrant ssh in the directory to SSH into the VM.

• Run sudo mn --test pingall within the VM to test that Mininet has been installed properly.

• If you need to copy files from/to the VM, you can use the vagrant-scp plugin: install with

  vagrant plugin install vagrant-scp
  

  and then you can copy files to the VM:

  vagrant scp local/path/to/file :remote/path/to/file
  

  or from the VM:

  vagrant scp :remote/path/to/file local/path/to/file
  

  Alternatively, you can use the synced folders feature to edit files in the VM locally.

• To use VSCode with the Vagrant VM, first run vagrant ssh-config in the repo's directory, and then append the output to your ~/.ssh/config file. You can rename the host as you like (change the first line to Host mininet). Then in VSCode you can connect to the mininet host.

  You can install the Python and Pylance extensions on the VM. You can add /home/vagrant/mininet, /home/vagrant/pox, /home/vagrant/openflow to the "python.analysis.extraPaths" settings to make code analysis work properly.

Using Wireshark

• You might need to install XQuartz (for macOS) or Xming (for Windows) for X11 forwarding.

• To use Wireshark, first install it:

  sudo apt install wireshark
  

• As the vagrant user, run sudo xauth add $(xauth list $DISPLAY) to allow root to use X11 Forwarding. You might have to do this every time you want to run Wireshark.

• Run sudo wireshark & to run Wireshark in the background.

• Once the controller is up, you will see the interfaces (e.g. s1-eth1) in Wireshark. You can choose any of them and view the packets it sends/receives.

Notes

• Because of compatibility issues in pox, we are stuck with Python 2 for now. We use the fangtooth version of pox and version 2.3.0d6 of Mininet.

• If you are located in China and experience difficulty downloading Vagrant boxes, you can use Tsinghua University's mirror. Simply run the following command before executing vagrant up:

  vagrant box add https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/ubuntu-cloud-images/focal/current/focal-server-cloudimg-amd64-vagrant.box --name ubuntu/focal64
  

• If you don't feel like installing Vagrant, you can also spin up your own Ubuntu VM on your favorite VM provider (VMware/VirtualBox/HyperV) or even cloud provider (AWS EC2?) and run the bootstrap.sh script to set up Mininet. We recommend using Vagrant because it abstracts away many provider- and OS-specific nuances, which have historically troubled many students getting set up for the project.