Mad Router

PEMU - Pix EMUlation and Dynamips - windows

We have ever seen in a previous article how dynamips can BE AWESOME. Dynamips helps us to emulate the hardware part of a router, but what about PIX ??!
So we can use PEMU !!

You will be able to find in this article the way to use PEMU, and more important, the way to couple PEMU with dynamips in order to emulate an entire network.

This article will deal with PEMU under windows, we will see in another article how to do the same thing for linux users.

To start we have to download PEMU (you have to create an account [free] in order to get the file).
Once we have it we untar the file and we get a folder which includes these files:

Place your PIX ios image in this folder, here I will use a pix722 image.
Edit the pemu.ini file and adapt it to the name of your image. You also can put the activation key of your PIX. If you don’t put this key, you will only have access to the default settings of your image.

serial=0x30392303
image=pix722
key=0x00000000,0x00000000,0x00000000,0x00000000
bios1=mybios_d8000
bios2=bios.bin
bios_checksum=1

Now open a console and navigate to the pemu folder

X:\\Documents and Settings\\bdg>cd Desktop/newversion_pemu

In this example we want to create an emulation with 2 interfaces connected to 2 routers we will launch with dynamips.

In the PEMU folder create an empty file named FLASH otherwise pemu will try to write in this file, and an error will occur because this file does not exist.
Then we will be able to launch pemu:

X:\\Documents and Settings\\bdg\\Desktop\\newversion_pemu>pemu.exe -net nic,
macaddr=AA:AA:AA:00:00:01 -net udp,sport=1000,dport=1001,daddr=127.0.0.1
 -net nic,macaddr=AA:AA:AA:00:00:02 -net udp,sport=2000,dport=2001,
daddr=127.0.0.1 -serial telnet::666,server FLASH

Here we have launched our pix image with 2 interfaces on the UDP ports 1000,1001 and 2000,2001 (1000 for the source port and 1001 the destination port, same thing for 2000 and 2001).

To connect to the PIX, open another console an telnet localhost on the 666 TCP port.

X:\\>telnet 127.0.0.1 666

and you get something like that:

You can now configure your pix
A little problem occurs, when you type a command, an extra line is generated. This little bug can be fixed by configuring the telnet application you are using.
For the AZERTY users, type ctrl+$
For the QWERTY users, type ctrl+]

Welcome to Microsoft Telnet Client
Escape Character is 'CTRL+$'   

Microsoft Telnet> unset crlf
Line feed mode - Causes return key to send CR
Microsoft Telnet>[enter]

Type enter to go back to the pix.

Now all is good.

We are now going to see how to couple this PIX with the routers we will emulate with dynamips.

This will be very simple, we will bind an interface of a router to the interface:
NIO_udp:1001:127.0.0.1:1000
NIO_udp:2001:127.0.0.1:2000

That’s all folks !

Here is an example of a dynamips configuration file.

ghostios = true
sparsemem = true[localhost]   

[[2620]]
       image = \\Program Files\\Dynamips\\imagesc2600-adventerprisek9-mz.123-14.T7.bin
       idlepc = 0x802420dc
       ram = 128   

[[ROUTER R1]]
       model = 2620
       f0/0 = NIO_udp:1001:127.0.0.1:1000   

[[ROUTER R2]]
       model = 2620
       f0/0 = NIO_udp:2001:127.0.0.1:2000

When you configure your pix, ethernet 0 will be for the first udp port specified on the pix launched, so here it’s 1001, 1000, ethernet 1 the second one, etc..

TIPS:
If you unzip the PIX image you will save more speed when you will launch pemu, but don’t forget to change the name in the pemu.ini file.

You can create a .bat file in your pemu folder in order to lauch pemu quicker, the file will look like this:

pemu.exe -net nic,macaddr=AA:AA:AA:00:00:01 -net udp,sport=1000,dport=1001,
daddr=127.0.0.1 -netnic,macaddr=AA:AA:AA:00:00:02 -net udp,sport=2000,dport=2001,
daddr=127.0.0.1 -serial telnet::666,server FLASH

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