802101.com: GNS3 1.0 goes beta

GNS3 1.0 is now in beta. It's been fun watching the alpha, which was a complete redesign from the ground up, grow and expand, and now we have hit the beta stages.

So what's the difference in the beta, vs the alpha?

Initially it doesn't look like much has changed on the interface front since the initial alpha, so let's dig a little deeper.

The change log shows the following:

Change Log for Beta 1 of V1.0

The GNS3 all-in-one installer automatically installs a 32-bit or 64-bit version of GNS3.
Base VirtualBox support (still some issues, most of them on Linux and Mac OS X).
Prevent users to set the port and VLAN settings to 0 on Ethernet swithes.
Fixed issue when spaces are in capture file paths.
Fixed bug with live capture on Windows.
Work around for the c7200 reload bug in Dynamips <= 0.2.13.
Fixed some inconsistencies when exporting configs.
The early release dialog is gone!

What's on the menu?

The menu has some cool new things on it, such as "Cloud" and "VirtualBox"

Its all about the Cloud these days

We have an option for "Cloud". But if you try and copy the link for "Create Cloud Account" you'll find that it doesn't go anywhere just yet. The only provider listed is Rackspace and they are pretty solid so it should be interesting.

Woo hoo VirtualBox!

VirtualBox is back, kind of. The menu items are all there:

GNS3 1.0 Beta VirtualBox is back (almost)

But it doesn't work just yet:

I couldn't find any vboxwrapper files in the GNS3.app, so I thought I would give it a go myself:

I started by doing a git clone of the vboxwrapper files (you'll need xcode installed to run git):

Stuarts-MacBook-Air:~ stu$ sudo git clone https://github.com/GNS3/vboxwrapper
Cloning into 'vboxwrapper'...
remote: Reusing existing pack: 15, done.
remote: Total 15 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (15/15), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:~ stu$ cd vboxwrapper/

Next we need to run the setup:

Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ sudo python setup.py install
running install
running bdist_egg
running egg_info
creating vboxwrapper.egg-info
writing vboxwrapper.egg-info/PKG-INFO
writing top-level names to vboxwrapper.egg-info/top_level.txt
writing dependency_links to vboxwrapper.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
writing entry points to vboxwrapper.egg-info/entry_points.txt
writing manifest file 'vboxwrapper.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
reading manifest file 'vboxwrapper.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
writing manifest file 'vboxwrapper.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
installing library code to build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg
running install_lib
warning: install_lib: 'build/lib' does not exist -- no Python modules to install

creating build
creating build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel
creating build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg
creating build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO
copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/PKG-INFO -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO
copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/SOURCES.txt -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO
copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/dependency_links.txt -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO
copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/entry_points.txt -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO
copying vboxwrapper.egg-info/top_level.txt -> build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/EGG-INFO
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
creating dist
creating 'dist/vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg' and adding 'build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg' to it
removing 'build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg' (and everything under it)
Processing vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg
Removing /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg
Copying vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg to /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages
vboxwrapper 0.9 is already the active version in easy-install.pth
Installing vboxwrapper script to /usr/local/bin

Installed /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/vboxwrapper-0.9-py2.7.egg
Processing dependencies for vboxwrapper==0.9
Finished processing dependencies for vboxwrapper==0.9

So can we now run the finished file?

Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ python /usr/local/bin/vboxwrapper 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/vboxwrapper", line 8, in 
    load_entry_point('vboxwrapper==0.9', 'console_scripts', 'vboxwrapper')()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 318, in load_entry_point
    return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 2221, in load_entry_point
    return ep.load()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 1954, in load
    entry = __import__(self.module_name, globals(),globals(), ['__name__'])
ImportError: No module named vboxwrapper

Nope, so let's make sure that things are installed properly:

Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ python
Python 2.7.5 (default, Mar  9 2014, 22:15:05) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.0.68)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from vboxapi import VirtualBoxManager
>>> g_vboxManager = VirtualBoxManager(None, None)
>>> print g_vboxManager.vbox.revision
91406
>>> exit()

At this stage I found the link that's mentioned below, so started to try those steps out:

Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ cd ~/Downloads/
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:Downloads stu$ cd vboxwrapper/
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ ls
LICENSE   build   setup.py  vboxcontroller_4_3.py vboxwrapper.py
README.md  dist   tcp_pipe_proxy.py vboxwrapper.egg-info
Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ sudo cp vboxwrapper.py tcp_pipe_proxy.py vboxcontroller_4_3.py /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/
Password:

So can we start the wrapper now?

Stuarts-MacBook-Air:vboxwrapper stu$ python vboxwrapper.py 
VirtualBox Wrapper (version 0.9)
Copyright (c) 2007-2014
Jeremy Grossmann and Alexey Eromenko
Using VirtualBox 4.3.6 r91406
VBoxWrapper TCP control server started (port 11525).
Listening on all network interfaces

Yes! We can! Let's try setting the vboxwrapper location to the new file and see what happens:

GNS3 1.0 Beta virtualbox wrapper configuration

Balls, I still get the same error:

So with the new beta we can see a lot of features on the horizon, every so slightly out of reach, but hopefully, and given the speed at which the GNS3 guys are pushing out the updates, it won't take long for VirtualBox to be working again. I'd love to connect up some CSR1000v routers to some IOU routers and I am sure that this is just around the corner, yet in some ways though it's also very frustrating to be teased like this.

It's important to remember that this is still beta, so things may be limited in functionality, or missing completely. There are reports of getting virtualbox running on the new beta over on the forums, but that looks to be for Linux, and probably done by someone who has more of a clue about python than I do!