Is There A Cisco-IOS Emulator?

Peter Berghmans asks: "Emulators everywhere today. It's not very difficult to run several OS-es at the same time. Just to try out something new, to develop, to learn. But I can't find an emulator for the Cisco-IOS. Although it would be usefull to learn about the OS of one of the most important pieces of hardware on the Internet: routers. Is there some development to run IOS under Linux?"

Re:CISH (Re:cisco ios emulators by sybex)

[Pegasus]

Now all i want is cish & zebra supporting iptables. Really ...

CISH (Re:cisco ios emulators by sybex)

[pim]

CISH is getting along just fine. The ipchains wrapping is currently exactly the same as on a native IOS shell. If you want to learn how to operate the basic environment of IOS with regards to static routes, interface configuration and access lists, the program will be quite usable

The CVS release contains elements that will allow a system to boot with cish handling the system initialization. Expect an LRP floppy that does this in the near future to be available for download.

An area where cish is still lacking is in dynamic routing. I am currently looking at ways to interface with parts of GNU Zebra to add support for BGP, OSPV, RIPv2 et al.

Cheers,
Pi

http://www.routersim.com/

[gavinmead]

You might wanna try RouterSim.com [routersim.com]. They are recommended by Sybex as a location for practicing for CCNA/CCNP.

Buy the real deal with Bill McNeal

[ruebarb]

I agree with the first post. I used to be a guy trying to get Cisco router experience, and I tried sims and the like, but NOTHING compares with the real object. You can use help easier, you can select Enterprise Plus IOS to get more features, and you can see how interfaces are set up and plug cables into them and observe the responses - and there's a ton of subfeatures you'll want to know that I don't think any sim product will support.

Now that I dig in routers every day, I'd rather buy a 2502 on Ebay for a few hundred bucks - usually, it's even cheaper then some sims - and you'll get the stuff down better then hoping your sim gives the correct output.

Re:Limited Scope

[olivieradam]

I got another solution : http://193.251.34.36 Here's a training Cisco router, where you can put some commands, compute some stats.

Thing

[blanktek]

There is software on Cisco's site called Cisco ConfigMaker. It won't give you the Cisco CLI, but you can create maps between devices and see how it creates the IOS config.

Re:cisco ios emulators by sybex

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for Cisco. There is a product called the Cisco Secure Policy Manager. It lets you map out your topology and describe policies for traffic flow. It then generates the necessary configurations and will push them to the devices.

Cisco, of all people, has one

[anticypher]

Cisco sells a product called CIM, the Cisco Interacive Mentor.

Its not a fully functional IOS emulator, it is used for training for various certificates. There are maybe a dozen different flavors, maybe even more now. There were modules for routing protocols, wan links, lan switching, and some others. Maybe what the training companies are selling is the same thing, repackaged.

Go search their site [cisco.com] for CIM and simulator, and you'll find it.

They used to give these out at Networker conferences like candy, but most of the people who can afford to go to Networkers already know more about routers than can use the disks. Try asking around any cisco people you know. I gave away all my copies of the disk I've ever had.

As others have mentioned, buy yourself a used router on ebay. Start with one (a 2513 or so), and expect to buy at least two others later to build your own networks. There are tons of scenarios of things to try out floating around the internet, and a bunch of sites where you can telnet into a term server and play around with a small stack of routers. Watch the comp.dcom.cisco newsgroups for info. When you have studied enough, you can usually re-sell the routers for about 75%-80% of what you paid for them, they don't depreciate very much.

If you are in europe, I've got a couple of AGS+ routers sitting unused, and I can't even give them away. They have every bizarre interface cisco ever made, and are perfect for studying IOS 11.0.

the AC

Re:cisco ios emulators by sybex

[Dr. Evil]

I've tried one of those simulators, I don't recall the name of the program, but I think it was written by Todd Lammle. Very poor. (To his credit, he writes better books.) It was not the kind of thing you could hack around with. I suppose my greatest complaint is that very simple broken configurations would actually work when they're not supposed to. Very simple problems, like setting up static routes in only one direction, and having reply packets make it through. Despite all these bugs, it costs roughly $300. I *ahem* evaluated the product before deciding that it didn't perform as advertised.

I was lucky because in Toronto we have a study group. They have a router lab available online for Toronto-area residents. It is not cost effective nor all that rewarding to allow people to book time on the routers globally... but you might want to search the web.. you might find something.

Your other option as somebody recommended is to build your own lab. Most people studying for their CCNE do this. Writing the exams is the only reason I could think that somebody would ask specifically for an IOS emulator.

I did a quick search and there does appear to be a Cisco IOS emulator for modifying ipchains rules using IOS commands. It looks pretty young. It didn't exist when I was studying for my CCNA http://www.tarball.net/cish/ [tarball.net]

I should probably give it a try some day.

Limited Scope

[false_sense_of_sec]

I am sure you are already aware of the IOS "simulators" available with various training products. If this isn't sufficient for your needs, I would suggest heading to ebay to buy an old (upgradable rom) router. Without the interfaces, the IOS isn't terribly useful.

Try Zebra...

[velkro]

Zebra [zebra.org] ( is still beta, last I looked) but is a full implementation of rip/ospf/bgp/etc... and the configuration interface is nearly identical to IOS.

The benifit here is that it's real, so you can setup 2 (or more) boxes and actually *make something work* rather than paste commands blindly into an emulator. And, of course, it's GPL'd. Better than Merit's gated [gated.org] implementation of the above protocols, and easier to configure.

cisco ios emulators by sybex

[whi5tler]

There are two versions from Sybex. One for ccna ($80), and one for ccnp ($300). I just got the ccna version. I found the ccna version at http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=0782127282&vm= but I couldn't find the ccnp version for sale.

Is there any effort being put into emulating a network? Do all of the configuration ahead of time, and just copy it over. or whatever elese we could dream up.