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Netkit-NG Homepage

What is Netkit-NG

Netkit-NG is a fork of the Netkit project to bring new functionnalities and support for recent debian kernels and filesystems:

  • netkit-ng-core is an updated version of netkit-core which support the new fs image format and includes other contributions released by various github users.
  • netkit-ng-build is a set of reusable scripts to build the fs and kernel binaries for Netkit. The solution is based on rootstrap (a script to build UML fs maintained by debian team) and the kernels provided by Debian. At the present time, only Wheezy is supported.

What is the differences between Netkit-NG and Netkit ?

Netkit-NG
  • filesystem and kernel based on Debian Wheezy
  • uml_dump support (UML network sniffer without root rights)
  • The FS and kernel can be rebuild: adding / removing packages and change kernel options are possible
Netkit
  • filesystem and kernel based on Debian lenny (deprected since 02/2012)
  • stable since a long time
  • includes MPLS patches

Latest releases

Installing Netkit-NG

A complete Netkit-NG distribution consists of three different packages:

  • the Netkit-NG “core”, which contains commands, documentation and other stuff which is necessary for Netkit to work;
  • the Netkit-NG filesystem, which contains the filesystem for virtual machines;
  • the Netkit-NG kernel, which contains the kernel used by virtual machines.

Step 1: Download and unpack

Download all the files to the same directory of your choice:

Then unpack them by using the following commands:

$ tar -xjSf netkit-ng-core-32-3.0.4.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjSf netkit-ng-filesystem-i386-F7.0-0.1.3.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjSf netkit-ng-kernel-i386-K3.2-0.1.3.tar.bz2

Step2: Configuration

The first step is to set the environment variables:

  • NETKIT_HOME variable to the name of the directory Netkit has been installed into.
  • MANPATH variable must be set to $NETKIT_HOME/man
  • PATH environment variable must include $NETKIT_HOME/bin

The simplest way to do it is to run the check configuration script and copy/ paste the recommandations. Run the check_configuration.sh’ script in the ` netkit-ng directory by typing:

$ ./check_configuration.sh

This script takes care of checking whether your system is configured properly to make Netkit run. Any misconfigurations are signalled and instructions for fixing them are reported as well. If the script exits with success, then Netkit is ready for use.