Route 0 is developed and officially supported only on Ubuntu 18.04 using the
distribution provided mininet package (version 2.2.2) and FRR Stable
installed from the FRR debian repositories. It
is almost certain that everything will work on any other Linux distribution
with a sufficiently up to date kernel, Mininet, and FRR installation, but this
has not been tested. For kernel compatibility please refer to the FRR
website.
The following instructions setup exactly the same VM that is suggested in the
main README file. The instructions are provided below if for some reason
you would prefer not to or are not able to use the pre-configured image.
For the base OS, the VM uses Xubuntu 18.04. Version 18.04, because it's the most recent LTS version and more importantly it comes with kernel version 4.18 which is new enough for all the FRR features. The XFCE spin was chosen as a GUI is helpful for wireshark as well as people unfamiliar with Linux. XFCE is a lightweight yet fully featured desktop environment.
You can download a Xubuntu 18.04 ISO image from the official website.
Install the OS in the virtualisation system of your choice. If you're not familiar with virtualisation systems, the easiest one to use and that is supported on all major operating systems is VirtualBox.
After the installation completes, install all updates. Xubuntu should prompt you to do so shortly after the first boot, but you can also do it manually from a terminal with the following command lines:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
Once the system finishes updating, I strongly recommend uninstalling
unattended-upgrades as they have been known to cause problems inside virtual
machines, especially with VirtualBox Guest Additions installed. To do so, open
the terminal and run the following command
sudo apt purge unattended-upgrades
If you are using VirtualBox, you may find it useful to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions. Note that these are not actually included in the provided VM image as the installation depends on the VirtualBox version in use.
The best way to install the guest additions is to install them from the ISO
image provided by VirtualBox. Before doing that though, you need to first
install dkms and build-essential. In the terminal inside the VM run
sudo apt install dkms build-essential
Now you need to obtain the CD. Open your VM and from the menu bar select
Devices->Insert Guest Additions CD image. This will download the image.
In case the download fails, you can download the image directly from the
VirtualBox website. Make sure
you choose the right version for your VirtualBox installation (you can find it
from the menu bar Help->About VirtualBox) and download the
VBoxGuestAdditions_<version>.iso. Once the download completes make sure to
mount it in the settings window of your virtual machine.
Open the file explorer in the VM and navigate to the inserted CD. From here
right click and select Open Terminal Here. The last step is now to run
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
Once the installation completes, reboot the VM. Amongst other things you can
now enable the shared clipboard from the menu bar with Devices->Shared Clipboard.
Mininet is available from the Ubuntu repositories. Simply run
sudo apt install mininet
It is also useful to install some other components for use with Mininet such as
wireshark. You can do that manually or use the Mininet script provided for
this purpose. You will need git installed for this. If you already have
git installed you can skip the first line
sudo apt install git
git clone git://github.com/mininet/mininet
mininet/util/install.sh -fw
Installing FRR is also easy on Ubuntu as the developers maintain a Debian repository which can be used for Ubuntu as well. To install FRR from this repository, install curl first
sudo apt install curl
and follow these instructions.
The above instructions will miss some useful tools which are good to have when building and troubleshooting networks. To install them run
sudo apt install traceroute