how to build a routing/packet filtering experimental environment on single PC

how to build a routing/packet filtering experimental environment on single PC

[Li Xinyi]

Hi, there

I started to learn iptables a few weeks ago. I am stuck at moment because I 
dont have many machines to play with. I am wondering is there any tools, 
which can be used to build a virtual envionment to play with routing and 
packet filtering on sinple machine. Tools like VMware would not be my 
choice because I only have 1GHz PIII with 256M memory.

Best Regards,
Christopher Li

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Re: how to build a routing/packet filtering experimental environment on single PC

[Antony Stone]

On Tuesday 29 June 2004 4:43 pm, Li Xinyi wrote:

> Hi, there
>
> I started to learn iptables a few weeks ago. I am stuck at moment because I
> dont have many machines to play with. I am wondering is there any tools,
> which can be used to build a virtual envionment to play with routing and
> packet filtering on sinple machine. Tools like VMware would not be my
> choice because I only have 1GHz PIII with 256M memory.

It's very hard to route any packets when you only have one machine (real or 
virtual).

I really think a minimum of two machines is necessary to do much experimenting 
with netfilter - one machine as a client you can control, one as the router / 
firewall you want to test things on, and then a connection to the Internet 
where you can find all the servers...

VMware would indeed be an effective way to do this, however 256Mb RAM isn't 
going to go very far :)

Regards,

Antony.

-- 
"Linux is going to be part of the future. It's going to be like Unix was."

 - Peter Moore, Asia-Pacific general manager, Microsoft

                                                     Please reply to the list;
                                                           please don't CC me.

Re: how to build a routing/packet filtering experimental environment on single PC

[Askar Ali Khan]

well do suggest to look around the corner if someone wana get rid of
his p1 or p11 old system , after getting the box use it as your
router/firewall machine :)
linux is great coz of it doesn't need heavy system to run on, 
mininum 16 MB of RAM and p1 or p11 would be enough 


On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 16:58:30 +0100, Antony Stone
<antony@soft-solutions.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> On Tuesday 29 June 2004 4:43 pm, Li Xinyi wrote:
> 
> > Hi, there
> >
> > I started to learn iptables a few weeks ago. I am stuck at moment because I
> > dont have many machines to play with. I am wondering is there any tools,
> > which can be used to build a virtual envionment to play with routing and
> > packet filtering on sinple machine. Tools like VMware would not be my
> > choice because I only have 1GHz PIII with 256M memory.
> 
> It's very hard to route any packets when you only have one machine (real or
> virtual).
> 
> I really think a minimum of two machines is necessary to do much experimenting
> with netfilter - one machine as a client you can control, one as the router /
> firewall you want to test things on, and then a connection to the Internet
> where you can find all the servers...
> 
> VMware would indeed be an effective way to do this, however 256Mb RAM isn't
> going to go very far :)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Antony.
> 
> --
> "Linux is going to be part of the future. It's going to be like Unix was."
> 
>  - Peter Moore, Asia-Pacific general manager, Microsoft
> 
>                                                      Please reply to the list;
>                                                            please don't CC me.
> 
>

Re: how to build a routing/packet filtering experimental environment on single PC

[Jozsef Kadlecsik]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Li Xinyi wrote:

> I started to learn iptables a few weeks ago. I am stuck at moment because I
> dont have many machines to play with. I am wondering is there any tools,
> which can be used to build a virtual envionment to play with routing and
> packet filtering on sinple machine. Tools like VMware would not be my
> choice because I only have 1GHz PIII with 256M memory.

UML (User-Mode Linux) is excellent for such purposes. You can definitely
run several virtual machines in 256M.

Best regards,
Jozsef
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