dynamips lab: Dynamips with Microsoft Loopback Interface
This tutorial is part 3 in a series of basic Dynamips tutorials. This particular tutorial demonstrates dynagen’s ability to create a virtual switch that allows your virtual routers to communicate with a PC via a loopback interface.
Use Windows loopback with Cisco Router Emulator
There are plenty of times where you might want to use Dynamips when not connected to a network. Maybe your out on the road and just want to practice some labs. It would be nice to have your laptop network adapter part of the emulated network – even when your laptop is not connected to any network.
The solution is to use a loopback adapter in Windows, then including it in your Dynagen config file.
First, create a new loopback adapter in Windows (these instructions are assuming Windows XP)
- Click Start, and then click Control Panel. Because this is XP, you may have it set up this way, or you may have your interface set up in Classic view. Either way, navigate your way to ‘Add Hardware’, or ‘Printers and Other Hardware’
- Launch the Wizard to Add Hardware to your system. Do not be confused because you are not actually installing any new hardware, just simply adding a ‘network adapter’ which is acting as a virtual adapter.
- Click next, once you have launched the Wizard. You will see a series of dialog boxes open to ask you about scanning for hardware changes, etc – you will want to do everything manually in this exercise. There will be no automatic scanning for any reason because you have not installed anything, the installation will immediately fail.
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