Marc Weisel

Arista has recently released a cEOS ARM64-based container image. This post will guide you through the process of downloading and importing the container image for Containerlab on macOS. Prerequisite Containerlab with macOS on Apple Silicon macOS Point your web browser to the Arista Software Download page. Log in with your Arista credentials. Click the cEOSarm-lab-4.33.1-EFT3.tar.xz file link to download. Save the cEOSarm-lab-4.33.1-EFT3.tar.xz file to your Downloads folder. Open your favorite terminal emulator, and change to the Downloads directory....

The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights belong to their respective owners. Cisco recently made the IOS on Linux (IOL) images available through the Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) Free Tier . IOL is an implementation of Cisco IOS-XE that operates as an executable binary on Linux. This post will guide you through the process of creating Cisco IOL container images using Containerlab on macOS....

Containerlab is rapidly emerging as a viable solution on macOS, thanks to the increasing availability of ARM64-based NOS container images. The following Containerlab kinds work excellent with macOS on Apple Silicon: Nokia SR Linux Arista cEOS Cisco IOL with Rosetta Prerequisites Mac computer with Apple silicon macOS 13.0 or later Git Steps Download OrbStack and open it. Open your favorite terminal emulator. We will work from the command line for the following steps....

I use Vagrant with the vagrant-libvirt plugin on my Arch Linux host quite extensively to quickly spin up dev and lab environments. The plugin’s development is mature and generally feature-complete, but the latest release was June 24, 2023. In the meantime, multiple commits were added to the main branch. I use the following process rather than the standard installation sourced from RubyGems . Prerequisites Verify these Arch packages are installed:...

The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights belong to their respective owners. I’ve read quite a few tutorials on Netmiko with GNS3, but none of them show you how to directly utilize the console connection as the management interface for Cisco devices. In addition to the CiscoIosSSH driver, Kirk Byers also implemented the CiscoIosTelnet driver for establishing a connection to a Cisco device....

The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights belong to their respective owners. Cisco recently made the IOS on Linux (IOL) images available through the Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) Free Tier . IOL is an implementation of Cisco IOS-XE that operates as an executable binary on Linux. This post will guide you through the process of adding Cisco IOL devices using GNS3 on macOS....

Most GNS3 users are familiar with VPCS . It’s the go-to device for simulating a simple endpoint node in our network labs. VPCS is suitable for the basics, but Docker supplies a selection of more feature-rich endpoint types. This post provides an example using Alpine Linux . Prerequisites GNS3 with macOS on Apple Silicon GNS3 client Steps Open your favorite terminal emulator. Download the latest alpine Docker image from Docker Hub ....

As of the date of this post, GNS3 does not provide a native client for macOS on Apple Silicon. This post aims to address that issue. While this post serves as a companion to GNS3 with macOS on Apple Silicon , the GNS3 client described here will also function with other types of remote GNS3 servers. Prerequisites Mac computer with Apple silicon macOS Sequoia Git Steps Open your favorite terminal emulator....

The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights belong to their respective owners. Dynamips may seem to be a bygone technology for the present day, but it’s still a great solution for learning routing concepts on emulated Cisco router platforms. Want to kick it old school with the Cisco 7200 Series Router? No problem. You can run 20 virtual instances on your Mac without it even breaking a sweat....

Ghostty is my primary terminal emulator for macOS, but I prefer to use a separate terminal emulator for GNS3 console (telnet) connections. After some research, I decided on Alacritty . It’s lightweight and supports the command-line options we need for GNS3. There are several ways to install Alacritty and Telnet, but I use MacPorts in this post. Steps Open your favorite terminal emulator (besides Alacritty 😉). Update the local ports tree with the global MacPorts ports repository....