The latest dynamips wasn’t available on the .deb distribution yet, so I tried to compile my own.

It wasn’t exactly hard, but took a bit of assumed knowledge and Googling to get it figured out.

Start by making sure you have the latest updates, and since I want to install GNS3 as well, I added the GNS3 ppa.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gns3/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gns3

Now this gns3 install installed dynamips 0.2.8 – but I wanted 0.2.9 so, to download it from the repository:

cd /tmp
wget https://github.com/GNS3/dynamips/archive/master.zip

Now unzip it

unzip master.zip
cd dynamips-master/

Ideally, I should just now be able to issue the make command, but through trial and Google, I found I had to install the following first

sudo apt-get install libelf-dev
sudo apt-get install uuid-dev
sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev

Now I can make (compile) the executable

make

If successful, an ls command should show you something like:

ls -lh
total 1.2M
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  83K Jul 31 09:49 ChangeLog
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user  12K Jul 31 09:49 common
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  18K Jul 31 09:49 COPYING
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 940K Aug  2 15:27 dynamips.stable
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  177 Jul 31 09:49 MAINTAINERS
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 2.0K Jul 31 09:49 Makefile
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4.0K Jul 31 09:49 man
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  579 Jul 31 09:49 profiler_resolve.pl
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  18K Jul 31 09:49 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  14K Jul 31 09:49 README.hypervisor
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1.1K Jul 31 09:49 RELEASE-NOTES
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user  12K Aug  2 15:27 stable
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  972 Jul 31 09:49 TODO
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4.0K Jul 31 09:49 unstable

However, the “made” executable is the wrong name (dynamips.stable) and in the wrong place.

which dynamips

shows me that dynamips is currently living at: /usr/bin/dynamips so let’s rename the old one and move the new one in

sudo mv /usr/bin/dynamips /usr/bin/dynamips.0.2.8
sudo mv dynamips.stable /usr/bin/dynamips

And finally test that it is 0.2.9

user@Mint15Cinnamon /tmp/dynamips-master $ dynamips -H 7200 &
[2] 8174
Cisco Router Simulation Platform (version 0.2.9-x86/Linux stable)
Copyright (c) 2005-2011 Christophe Fillot.
Build date: Aug  2 2013 15:26:16
Local UUID: 5777d714-c2ca-4e79-b64a-a47e3add19a7
user@Mint15Cinnamon /tmp/dynamips-master $ telnet 127.0.0.1 7200
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
hypervisor stop
100-OK
Hypervisor: closing control sockets.
Hypervisor: closing remote client connections.
Connection closed by foreign host.
Shutdown in progress...
Shutdown completed.

Loverly! All done!