Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop

Re:Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop by thomasreggi on Saturday February 23, 2013 @08:30PM (#5272306)

I read some documentation and I don't think I entirely get the whole "emulate a network" thing. What can be done with that? What exactly is a network? What this project makes me think of is as if one would replace the internet with another substitute internet or intranet, but I don't think thats the case. Something that it makes me think of is the idea of downloading a website with something like sitesucker and then changing your host file so that you can browse the internet via saved pages on your computer. But I don't think that this Mininet project has anything to do with that. I'm interested in trying to "get-it" if anyone has a clearer more non-obscure definition of what this project entails.

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Re:Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop by arjie on Saturday February 23, 2013 @08:43PM (#5272343)

It emulates a network. You would use it to, for instance, test if your OpenFlow controller is reacting to appropriate traffic in the correct way, or (using netem and gang) to see what happens when you introduce delay or packet loss over some interface.

An existing use for this sort of thing is as a prototype environment for a software defined network. See 'Live Migration of an Entire Software Defined Network' for an example of use.

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Re:Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop by xtacy on Saturday February 23, 2013 @08:44PM (#5272351)

It can mean different things to different people.

If you're a distributed systems developer, you can use Mininet to create a topology and emulate the interaction of 100s of, say, bittorrent clients.

If you're a graduate student in networking, you can use Mininet to experiment with your new routing protocol and compare it against existing ones such as OSPF, BGP, etc.

You can also use it to put existing research papers to the test: http://reproducingnetworkresearch.wordpress.com

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Re:Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop by thomasreggi on Sunday February 24, 2013 @12:13AM (#5272963)

I really like the example you give and am starting to ge the academic usage. Thanks for this reply!

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Re:Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop by xtacy on Sunday February 24, 2013 @11:31AM (#5274756)

You're welcome. There's a Mininet AMI too if you want to get started quickly!

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Re:Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop by ninetax on Saturday February 23, 2013 @09:47PM (#5272539)

Could you also use it to load test a web app?

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Re:Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop by jlogsdon on Saturday February 23, 2013 @10:12PM (#5272611)

You wouldn't need a fake network to load test a web app, and you'd end up being CPU bound for a good load test (as in, the load tester would be CPU bound, obviously you want the app to become maxed in CPU usage). AWS is actually great for doing something like this.

The Chicago Tribune actually released a tool to do load testing with AWS instances: http://blog.apps.chicagotribune.com/2010/07/08/bees-with-mac...

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