[ANN] Marionnet 0.50.0

[ANN] Marionnet 0.50.0

[Luca Saiu]

We are happy to announce the first public release of Marionnet, a
virtual network laboratory.

Marionnet allows users to simulate on a single host machine a complete
network made of virtual computers, hubs, switches and routers connected
by Ethernet cables; any single virtual device can be created, destroyed,
modified, booted, shut down, paused or resumed at any time, while the
rest of the network is running. It's also possible to simulate defects
in network components, with a very fine level of control.

The virtual network can also interoperate with the host machine network,
using the 'plug' device.

Virtual computers run unmodified GNU/Linux x86 application binaries on
the Debian distribution we provide; graphical application relying on X
are supported. Support for other non-debian x86 GNU/Linux distributions
is easy to add.

As the application is primarily targeted to students it features a very
intuitive graphical user interface.

The application logic is fully implemented in OCaml (see [1]), but
Marionnet relies on User Mode Linux [2] and Virtual Distributed Network
[3] for the low-level simulation part. We wish to thank Jeff Dike and
Renzo Davoli for these fine pieces of software.

The download page also contains a DVD image with Marionnet
pre-configured on a 'live' GNU/Linux system, directly running from the
DVD without need for installation.

Marionnet is free software, released under the GNU General Public
License. It comes with absolutely no warranty.

Marionnet is written by Jean-Vincent Loddo
(http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~loddo ) and Luca Saiu
(http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~saiu ), and is sponsored by Université
Paris 13 as an e-learning project.

Home page: http://www.marionnet.org

Thanks,

-- 
Luca Saiu
http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~saiu

[1] Status Report: Marionnet --- How to Implement a Virtual Network
Laboratory in Six Months and Be Happy
Jean-Vincent Loddo, Luca Saiu
ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on ML, Freiburg, 2007.
http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~saiu/marionnet.pdf

[2] User Mode Linux
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net

[3] Virtual Distributed Ethernet
http://vde.sourceforge.net