GNS3 1.0 is now in beta. It’s been fun watching the alpha, which was a complete redesign from the ground up, grow and expand, and now we have hit the beta stages.
So what’s the difference in the beta, vs the alpha?Initially it doesn’t look like much has changed on the interface front since the initial alpha, so let’s dig a little deeper.
Base VirtualBox support (still some issues, most of them on Linux and Mac OS X).
Prevent users to set the port and VLAN settings to 0 on Ethernet swithes.
Fixed issue when spaces are in capture file paths.
Fixed bug with live capture on Windows.
Work around for the c7200 reload bug in Dynamips <= 0.2.13.
Fixed some inconsistencies when exporting configs.
The early release dialog is gone!
What’s on the menu?
Its all about the Cloud these days
Woo hoo VirtualBox!
I started by doing a git clone of the vboxwrapper files (you’ll need xcode installed to run git):
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:~ stu$ sudo git clone https://github.com/GNS3/vboxwrapper Cloning into 'vboxwrapper'... remote: Reusing existing pack: 15, done. remote: Total 15 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0) Unpacking objects: 100% (15/15), done. Checking connectivity... done. Stuarts-MacBook-Air:~ stu$ cd vboxwrapper/
Next we need to run the setup:
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ sudo python setup.py install running install running bdist_egg running egg_info creating vboxwrapper.egg-info writing vboxwrapper.egg-info/PKG-INFO writing top-level names to vboxwrapper.egg-info/top_level.txt writing dependency_links to vboxwrapper.egg-info/dependency_links.txt writing entry points to vboxwrapper.egg-info/entry_points.txt writing manifest file 'vboxwrapper.egg-info/SOURCES.txt' reading manifest file 'vboxwrapper.egg-info/SOURCES.txt' writing manifest file 'vboxwrapper.egg-info/SOURCES.txt' installing library code to build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg running install_lib warning: install_lib: 'build/lib' does not exist -- no Python modules to install creating build creating build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel creating build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg creating build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/PKG-INFO -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/SOURCES.txt -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/dependency_links.txt -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/entry_points.txt -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/top_level.txt -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents... creating dist creating 'dist/vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg' and adding 'build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg' to it removing 'build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg' (and everything under it) Processing vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg Removing /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg Copying vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg to /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages vboxwrapper 0.9 is already the active version in easy-install.pth Installing vboxwrapper script to /usr/local/bin Installed /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg Processing dependencies for vboxwrapper==0.9 Finished processing dependencies for vboxwrapper==0.9
So can we now run the finished file?
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ python /usr/local/bin/vboxwrapper Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/bin/vboxwrapper", line 8, in load_entry_point('vboxwrapper==0.9', 'console_scripts', 'vboxwrapper')() File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 318, in load_entry_point return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name) File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 2221, in load_entry_point return ep.load() File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 1954, in load entry = __import__(self.module_name, globals(),globals(), ['__name__']) ImportError: No module named vboxwrapper
Nope, so let’s make sure that things are installed properly:
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ python Python 2.7.5 (default, Mar 9 2014, 22:15:05) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.0.68)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> from vboxapi import VirtualBoxManager >>> g_vboxManager = VirtualBoxManager(None, None) >>> print g_vboxManager.vbox.revision 91406 >>> exit()
At this stage I found the link that’s mentioned below, so started to try those steps out:
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ cd ~/Downloads/ Stuarts-MacBook-Air:Downloads stu$ cd vboxwrapper/ Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ ls LICENSE build setup.py vboxcontroller_4_3.py vboxwrapper.py README.md dist tcp_pipe_proxy.py vboxwrapper.egg-info Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ sudo cp vboxwrapper.py tcp_pipe_proxy.py vboxcontroller_4_3.py /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/ Password:
So can we start the wrapper now?
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ python vboxwrapper.py VirtualBox Wrapper (version 0.9) Copyright (c) 2007-2014 Jeremy Grossmann and Alexey Eromenko Using VirtualBox 4.3.6 r91406 VBoxWrapper TCP control server started (port 11525). Listening on all network interfaces
Yes! We can! Let’s try setting the vboxwrapper location to the new file and see what happens:
Balls, I still get the same error:
So with the new beta we can see a lot of features on the horizon, every so slightly out of reach, but hopefully, and given the speed at which the GNS3 guys are pushing out the updates, it won’t take long for VirtualBox to be working again. I’d love to connect up some CSR1000v routers to some IOU routers and I am sure that this is just around the corner, yet in some ways though it’s also very frustrating to be teased like this.
It’s important to remember that this is still beta, so things may be limited in functionality, or missing completely. There are reports of getting virtualbox running on the new beta over on the forums, but that looks to be for Linux, and probably done by someone who has more of a clue about python than I do!