Eggplant Network CLI Guide

The Eggplant Network Emulator’s GUI and LCD panel send commands to set up and control the Emulator. The command line and socket API let you perform important functions within your own scripting or programming.

This guide covers all command-line interface (CLI) and API options available in the Emulator. These options are:

Start and stop an emulation
List the defined emulations
List the defined emulations, filtered by types:
- Point-to-point
- Multi-hop
- Profiled
Show the running emulations
Stop the running emulations

Emulator Concepts

You should be familiar with the concepts and operation of the Emulator as explained in the Eggplant Network Emulator User and Administration Guide before reading this guide or attempting to use the command line or API.

Here are the essentials:

The Emulator transfers packets from one physical network port (or VM equivalent, when the Emulator is running in a VM environment) to another physical network port. While transferring the packet, the Emulator can perform certain actions on the packet, such as delaying the packet, losing the packet, and damaging the packet.

There are three major concepts in the Emulator:

Physical ports and port pairs
Emulations
Links

These concepts are explained in the sections below.

Physical Ports and Port Pairs

Physical ports connect the Emulator to the external network. The ports are used in port pairs: ports 0 and 1 and ports 2 and 3. The latter port pair is not available on all models of Eggplant Network.

Packets entering one port in a port pair emerge from the other port, unless the packet is (deliberately) lost.

Emulations

Emulations consist of one or more links (see next section), with appropriate settings for each link, which have been named and saved on the Emulator. You can have many emulations stored on the Emulator, but only one emulation can be started on a port pair at a time.

Emulations are separated into three types:

Point-to-point
Multi-hop (or Dual-hop)
Profiler

The User and Administration Guide describes these types fully, and the API divides emulations into these categories when asked for a list.

Links

Links allow multiple network circuits to be provided simultaneously by channeling appropriate traffic (by IP address, IP port, or VLAN ID) through a particular link. Which link traffic uses is determined by the Link Qualification Criteria set up when the emulation is defined in the GUI.

The process is that packets enter a port in a port pair (e.g., port 0), then are directed to a link based on Link Qualification Criteria. The link then applies the defined network limitations (impairments), and the packets are recombined from the separate links and output through the other port in the port pair (port 1, in our example).

See the Eggplant Network Emulator User and Administration Guide for more information.

This topic was last updated on August 19, 2021, at 03:30:51 PM.