CORE—Common Open Research Emulator—INSTALL—Network Emulator

March 20, 2014 — 

wget

I previously discussed . Now I want to install the newest version of CORE — version 4.6 — in a newer Linux distrubution for which the CORE development team has not yet created pre-built packages. In this case, I will install CORE in Xubuntu 13.04.

Read the rest of this post to learn how to install and set up the on a host computer running any Debian-based Linux distribution, such as .

UPDATE August 18 2014: I recently installed CORE version 4.7 on Xubuntu 14.04. The installation worked fine. Just replace the text “4.6” with “4.7” in the steps below. However, there are some major issues in CORE 4.7 that are not yet fixed. I recommend installing CORE 4.6, instead.

Install CORE from source code

To build and install the CORE Network Emulator from source code, enter the following commands (the current version is CORE 4.6):

1. Install all required supporting software:

   $ sudo apt-get install bash bridge-utils ebtables \
     iproute libev-dev python tcl8.5 tk8.5 libtk-img \
     autoconf automake gcc libev-dev make python-dev \
     libreadline-dev pkg-config imagemagick help2man 

2. Download the CORE source code and install files.

   $ cd ~/Downloads
   $ wget  

3. Uncompress the source files and build the CORE system.

   $ tar xzf core-4.6.tar.gz
   $ cd core-4.6
   $ ./bootstrap.sh
   $ ./configure
   $ make
   $ sudo make install 

Test CORE

To test that the CORE Network Emulator is working, start the CORE daemon and the GUI.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/core-daemon start
$ core-gui 

Then, using the CORE tool bar, create a simple network with two PCs connected to each other and start the simulation.

At his point, I should be able to test that CORE is working by opening a shell on one of the PCs and using the ping command to see that the simulation is working correctly by testing that each node can ping the other node.

Conclusion

We successfully installed the CORE Network Emulator from source code using a procedure that should work in most Debian-based Linux distributions.

At this point, we can simulate a basic switched LAN with simple PCs connected to a switch. We still need to that will run in each virtual node before we can use CORE to emulate the operation of different types of IP networks.

We will discuss in another post.

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1. You can also use an internet browser to obtain the CORE source files from the CORE downloads page at the following URL: