In my last post I was pretty discouraged and I believe I described our project as “hosed”. I may have been a little premature with that assessment.
Al, who was just as discouraged as I was, had a brainstorm and started searching for simulators that can handle MPLS. He came across one called GNS3. It’s an open source simulator that allows you to load an IOS .bin file to the router in the simulator. This allows you to give the router a modern enough OS to be able to configue it for MPLS. It comes in both Linux and Windows flavors and not knowing which would work better we decided to try to load both. I fired up VMware on my laptop and loaded my Fedora 11 machine and he grabbed his laptop with 64 bit Windows Vista on it. We both went to SourceForge and downloaded the program and set out to get it working. After a brief 3.5 hours of extreme frustration I decided to shut down my Fedora virtual machine and try to install it on my laptop’s 64 bit Windows 7 OS. A brief hour and a half later I finally had success! The simulator FINALLY worked! Al had one little box checked that was preventing him from getting it to work on his computer (isn’t that always the way). So we both loaded up a .bin file of IOS version 12 or newer and tried to configure a router. IT WORKED! I think that Al and I may have burned out a few of Google’s servers figuring that out tonight. Now we just need to figure out how to configure an MPLS network. Hahahahaha (imagine the Joker laughing here).
I’m happy that we should now be able to stick with our original plan. I’m also a little intimidated by the prospect of having to learn all of the new command line stuff in the next few weeks. But I’m no longer discouraged about this project.
To infinity and beyond…
