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.

Prerequisites

Steps

  1. Open your favorite terminal emulator.

  2. Create the IOS directory.

mkdir -p ~/GNS3/images/IOS
  1. Copy the Cisco image files to the IOS directory.

For my example, I will copy the c3640-jk9o3s-mz.124-16a.bin and c7200-adventerprisek9-mz.124-24.T5.bin image files from my Downloads directory.

cp -v ~/Downloads/c*.bin ~/GNS3/images/IOS
  1. Change to the IOS directory.
cd ~/GNS3/images/IOS
  1. Uncompress the Cisco image files.
for f in c*.bin; do unzip -p "$f" > "${f%.bin}.image"; rm "$f"; done

Disregard the warning message.

  1. Open the GNS3 client application.

  2. Click the Settings button.

  3. Select IOS routers on the left side menu.

  4. Click the New button.

  5. Click the Browse… button.

  6. Navigate to and select a Cisco image file.

I will select c7200-adventerprisek9-mz.124-24.T5.image for my example.

Select Cisco image

  1. Click the Open button.

  2. Click the Next button after the upload completes.

  3. Click the Next button using the default c7200 for name and platform.

  4. Click the Next button using the default 512 MiB for RAM.

  5. Click the Next button using the default network adapter in slot 0.

  6. Click the Finish button skipping the Idle-PC finder operation.

We will perform this operation in a later step.

  1. Click the Edit button.

  2. Enter :/symbols/affinity/circle/blue/router.svg for the Symbol value.

  3. Click the OK button.

  4. Click the Apply button to save the template configuration.

Dynamips device template

  1. Click the OK button to close the GNS3 Preferences window.

  2. Press the ⌘ + n key combo to create a new GNS3 project.

  3. Enter c7200-idle-pc for the Name of the project.

  4. Click the OK button.

  5. Drag the c7200 router from the Devices Toolbar and drop it on the Workspace.

  6. Right-click on the R1 router and select Start.

R1 context menu
  1. Again, right-click on the R1 router but now select Auto Idle-PC.
Dynamips Idle-PC window
  1. Click the OK button.