Project Setup

Virtualbox setup

If you do not have Virtualbox already installed on your machine, grab the executable for your platform by visiting the link below:

Virtualbox Installer

Instructions for how to install Virtualbox on different platforms can be found here:

Virtualbox Installation Details

Finally, make sure you install the Virtualbox Extension Pack which you can find on the same page where you obtained the Virtualbox Installer.

Download appliances

You will need the following virtual appliances for this project. Details on how to use them are given in the next section.

centos_8_base.ova

border_rtr.ova

The border router (border_rtr) provides some custom services which are needed for the project but cannot be configured directly on Virtualbox in-built NAT router

CentOS is Red Hat-compatible Linux distribution with the same networking capabilities provided by Red Hat Enterprise servers. The centos_8_base.ova will be used as the base image for all other virtual devices that we will create for this project.

Create your first network

Your first network

In this activity, we are going to create two virtual machines, r1 and r2, and connect them to a network which they will share with the host, i.e they will be directly accessible from the host.

Later, we will configure these two VM's to perform a variety of functions of which routing will be the most important.

All the VM's in this project use the same login credentials:

Username: admin
Password: P@ssw0rd

Launch Virtualbox
Create a host-only network (Virtualbox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter #2 on Windows or vboxnet2 if you are on Mac) with the following configuration:
- IP Address: 10.26.20.253
- Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Import into Virtualbox the two appliances you downloaded earlier:
- border_rtr.ova:
  - Name it border_rtr
  - Make sure its network adapters are configured as follows (this should already be the case except if you are on a Mac):
  - Adapter 1: Attached to NAT, adapter type (Paravirtualized), promiscuous mode (Allow all)
  - Adapter 2: Attached to Virtualbox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter #2 (vboxnet2 if you are on a Mac), adapter type (Paravirtualized), promiscuous mode (Allow all)
- centos_8_base.ova: No need to do anything. We will use it only to clone other VM's (see next step)
  - Never run this image directly. If you do it can potentially interfere with any running VM that was cloned based off it.
Use the centos_8_base.ova image to clone two virtual machines and configure them as follows:
- VM 1:
  - Name: r1
  - Adapter 1: Attached to Virtualbox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter #2, adapter type (Paravirtualized), promiscuous mode (Allow all), MAC address: 020000000001
- VM 2:
  - Name: r2
  - Adapter 1: Attached to Virtualbox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter #2, adapter type (Paravirtualized), promiscuous mode (Allow all), MAC address: 020000000002

Start the VM's, making sure to start border_rtr first. Once all VM's are running, log into each and change the hostname to match the VM's name:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname [vm_name]

You should now be able to send ping probes between the VM's or between the VM's and the outside networks.

Verify your setup

Download this Python script and save it to a suitable location on your computer.

Note

You will many of this kind of scripts throughout the term. Thus, it might be a good idea to create a folder for this course somewhere on you computer. Call it something like **ACIT2620**. Inside this folder, create another folder and name it **project_scripts** where you will keep all the scripts. That way it will be easier to find them.

Before you can run the script, you must ensure that vboxmanage (the VirtualBox CLI interface) is on your system path.
Open a terminal and navigate to the location where you saved the script.
Run the script to generate a report of your setup, like so:

python test_setup.py A0#####

where A0##### is your BCIT student ID number.

Open the report and examine its contents

SSH setup

SSH (Secure Shell) is a software utility that allows you to securely log into a running system remotely. By default, SSH will prompt you for the remote host's hostname (or IP address), username and password, but it is possible to enable password-less login using public key/private key pair.

The centos_8_base.ova is already configured with a public key, so all we need is a private key which you can download from here:

acit_admin_id_rsa

Next, complete the following steps:

Locate the .ssh folder under your host's home directory and copy the key you just downloaded into this folder
Create a text file called config inside this .ssh folder and add content similar to the following:

host border
    Hostname 10.26.20.254
    User admin
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/acit_admin_id_rsa

host r1
    Hostname 10.26.20.100
    User admin
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/acit_admin_id_rsa

host r2
    Hostname 10.26.20.200
    User admin
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/acit_admin_id_rsa

From your host's command-line interface (e.g. Powershell), try and access one of your VM's via SSH: e.g. ssh r1