NePA TesT: Community Network Emulator

Mininet Installation/Configuration Notes

Mininet 2.0.0

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The supported installation methods for Mininet are 1) using

a pre-built VM image, and 2) native installation on Ubuntu. You

can also easily create your own Mininet VM image (3).

(Other distributions may be supported in the future - if you would

like to contribute an installation script, we would welcome it!)

1. Easiest "installation" - use our pre-built VM image!

The easiest way to get Mininet running is to start with one of our pre-built 

virtual machine images from http://openflow.org/mininet

Boot up the VM image, log in, and follow the instructions on the wiki page.

One advantage of using the VM image is that it doesn't mess with

your native OS installation or damage it in any way.

Although a single Mininet instance can simulate multiple networks with

multiple controllers, only one Mininet instance may currently be run at

a time, and Mininet requires root access in the machine it's running on.

Therefore, if you have a multiuser system, you may wish to consider

running Mininet in a VM.

2. Next-easiest option: use our Ubuntu package!

To install Mininet itself (i.e. mn and the Python API) on Ubuntu 12.10+

  sudo apt-get install mininet

Note: if you are upgrading from an older version of Mininet, make sure you

remove the old OVS from /usr/local:

  sudo rm /usr/local/bin/ovs*

  sudo rm /usr/local/sbin/ovs*

3. Native installation from source on Ubuntu 11.10+

If you're reading this, you've probably already done so, but the command to

download the Mininet source code is;

  git clone git://openflow.org/mininet.git

If you are running Ubuntu, you may be able to use our handy install.sh script,

which is in mininet/util.

WARNING: USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

install.sh is a bit intrusive and may possibly damage your OS and/or

home directory, by creating/modifying several directories such as

mininet, openflow, openvswitch and noxcore. Although we hope it won't

do anything completely terrible, you may want to look at the script

before you run it, and you should make sure your system and home

directory are backed up just in case!

To install Mininet itself, the OpenFlow reference implementation, and

Open vSwitch, you may use:

$ mininet/util/install.sh -fnv

This should be reasonably quick and the following command should work

after the installation:

$ sudo mn --test pingall

To install ALL of the software which we use for OpenFlow tutorials,

including NOX classic, the OpenFlow WireShark dissector, the oftest

framework, and other potentially useful software (and to add some stuff

to /etc/sysctl.conf which may or may not be useful) you may use

$ mininet/util/install.sh -a

This takes about 20 minutes on our test system.

4. Creating your own Mininet/OpenFlow tutorial VM

Creating your own Ubuntu Mininet VM for use with the OpenFlow tutorial

is easy! First, create a new Ubuntu VM. Then, run

$ wget https://raw.github.com/mininet/mininet/util/vm/install-mininet-vm.sh

$ time install-mininet-vm.sh

5. Installation on other Linux distributions

Although we don't support other Linux distributions directly, it should be

possible to install and run Mininet with some degree of manual effort.

In general, you must have:

* A Linux kernel compiled with network namespace support enabled

* An OpenFlow implementation (either the reference user or kernel

  space implementations, or Open vSwitch.) Appropriate kernel modules

  (e.g. tun and ofdatapath for the reference kernel implementation) must

  be loaded.

* Python, `bash`, `ping`, `iperf`, etc.

* Root privileges (required for network device access)

We encourage contribution of patches to the `install.sh` script to support

other Linux distributions.

Good luck!

Mininet Team

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