http://blog.gns3.net/2009/10/olive-juniper/
Olive reloaded or how to emulate Juniper routers
October 29th, 2009 by
Jeremy Grossmann Leave a reply »
«
1. Introduction
2. Qemu
compilation & patching
3.
FreeBSD installation
4.
JunOS installation
5.
Running and networking routers
6.
Testing
7.
Conclusion
»
This article explain you how to emulate
Juniper JunOS on a PC using Qemu. This is an updated and enhanced version of
excellent howtos from Juniper
Clue and Internetwork Pro as well as Himawan Nugroho’s blog. I mainly focused on Qemu,
so if you wish to install JunOS on a real PC or using VMware, please
have a look at the Juniper Clue article for more information (and of
course Google).
So what’s new you would say? First, I
chose to use the latest version of Qemu:
the 0.11.0 which supports the Intel e1000 network card emulation since
version 0.10.0. and includes several fixes for it. I have modified and
adapted the old patch for Qemu 0.11.0, it includes the UDP tunnel
(connection to Dynamips/GNS3), PCAP and LCAP support. Also, the patch
allows multicast traffic with the e1000, i82557b and i82559er Qemu
emulated network cards. Moreover, this article show how to emulate
JunOS on multiple operating systems: Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux
Ubuntu 9.04 without using an untrustworthy obscure binary downloaded
from a forum you can’t even read the language 
Disclaimer
Please note that JunOS is not provided
and will not be. So please don’t ask. Also, I do not take any
responsibility on what happen on your PC, keep in mind this howto
requires some patience and that is not for complete beginners.
Moreover, this howto doesn’t necessarily present the best and/or
easiest way to emulate JunOS. This is the cleanest and less intrusive
for me but please feel free to give me constructive comments and tell
what worked or didn’t worked for you.
What is a Olive?
This is very well summarized on the JuniperClue
website:
Olive is also the codename name given
to JUNOS software running on an PC rather than a Juniper router. A
common misconception is that Olive is some sort of “special software”,
but it is actually ordinary JUNOS software running on a PC of similar
specifications to a Routing Engine, with no forwarding hardware (or
PFE) attached. If you took a Routing Engine out of a Juniper router and
booted it in a blade server chassis, it would effectively be an Olive.
Juniper originally developed Olive
functionality as a software development platform, before its hardware
product was fully implemented. It is not intended as a “router
simulator”, and has never been a supported product, or intended for use
by the general public in any way. At one point it was used by Juniper
internally for lab work, but has largely been phased out of this role
with the availability of low-end hardware based platforms such as the
M5.
The most common use of the Olive
platform is for creative and unix-competent hackers to learn the JUNOS
CLI on a low-cost platform. It is capable of forwarding a small amount
of traffic, but does not support many of the features found on real
Juniper routers. Essentially the forwarding on an Olive is the same as
routing traffic via your fxp0 or em0 management interface on a real
Routing Engine.
Ok so why all the secrecy?
Again, JuniperClue
explained all of this:
Juniper’s official position is that
Olive does not exist. Considering that Olive is an unsupported and
unsupportable platform using “free” (aka illegally licensed) software,
this is not an unreasonable official position. Olive is essentially a
hackers platform, with absolutely no support of any kind, and it is not
suitable for any type of commercial use. If you are in any doubt, or if
you are not able to figure it out, you should invest in a low-cost
platform such as J-Series instead.
It is also important to remember that Olive exists
because Juniper allows it to exist, and is a testament to the mutual
respect between the extremely knowledgeable developer and user bases.
If the Olive platform became widely abused, Juniper could easily add
additional software checks to prevent it from working. Please do not
abuse this feature by doing stupid things like contacting JTAC for
support on an Olive, or selling illegal copies of the software as
“router simulators”. This type of activity is likely to have serious
legal consequences and/or provoke a justified response from Juniper, so
just don’t do it.
