Marionnet is a virtual network laboratory: it allows users to define, configure and run complex computer networks without any need for physical setup. Only a single, possibly even non-networked GNU/Linux host machine is required to simulate a whole Ethernet network complete with computers, routers, hubs, switchs, cables, and more.
Support is also provided for integrating the virtual network with the physical host network.

As Marionnet is meant to be used also by inexperienced people, it features a very intuitive graphical user interface. Marionnet is written in the mostly functional language OCaml with just some little bits of C, and depends on User Mode Linux and VDE for the simulation part.

We have a separate page explaining how to install Marionnet. For people who want to see how Marionnet looks like before downloading it, we have some screenshots at the demo page.

Marionnet Developer Documentation
Marionnet i18n

Do you have a question? It's quite likely it's been already asked and answered before, either in our FAQ here or on launchpad.

Marionnet debian/ubuntu packages, as of now only for debian lenny on x86¹⁾

We would like to have a quick introduction to Marionnet explaining the basic ideas to newcomers.
With your help we would like to prepare some more howtos, and manuals.

The following are peer-reviewed academic papers about Marionnet:

• Marionnet: A Virtual Network Laboratory and Simulation Tool. Jean-Vincent Loddo, Luca Saiu. SimulationWorks, Marseille (France), 2008. PDF.
  Note: the first part is a simple user-oriented introduction to Marionnet. Section 7 outlines a possible usage scenario for Marionnet, not related to teaching.

• Status Report: Marionnet — How to Implement a Virtual Network Laboratory in Six Months and Be Happy. Jean-Vincent Loddo, Luca Saiu. ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on ML, Freiburg (Germany), 2007. PDF.
  Note: This is a reasonably detailed description of how Marionnet is implemented.

• Marionnet : un logiciel graphique pour l’apprentissage et l’enseignement des réseaux locaux d’ordinateurs. Jean-Vincent Loddo. Premier Workshop pédagogique “Réseaux & Télécoms”, Saint-Pierre de la Réunion (France), 2007. PDF. Note: This paper is in French.

This is the index of all the documentation which currently exists on the wiki (papers can't be wikified due to the gratuitously restrictive copyright policies of most scientific conferences).

Some lab exercises you can reuse (in French, License Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike) are available here.

Are you already using Marionnet for teaching, or in some other context? Would you like to start? We would love to hear your story.

If you're curious about how Marionnet is implemented or you're considering to participate, first of all you should read this paper.

We now use launchpad for development. See the page https://www.launchpad.net/marionnet .

Marionnet has been written by Jean-Vicent Loddo and Luca Saiu; Jonathan Roudiere works as the administrator of this site and on Marionnet packaging. Anyway, there are many more people to thank.

You are welcome to join us: we need programmers, documenters, translators…

Marionnet is sponsored by Université Paris 13.

If you have problems using Marionnet, please ask us for help with this interface: https://answers.launchpad.net/marionnet . That way your questions remain publicly archived, and they may be useful to others in the future.

Most of the discussions about Marionnet development take place on the marionnet-dev mailing list on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~marionnet-dev . Notice that you must be subscribed to the team to write us (it's public, you can make an account on launchpad and add yourself). Yes, it's very silly, but it's a launchpad policy we can't change.

The wiki is still very small; we're waiting for your contributions to make it grow.

You're welcome to create an account if you don't have it yet, and log in. Then feel free to edit to make this site better, by adding any useful information. Don't worry if your English is not perfect — that's easy to fix later.

If you want to make experiments with the wiki, please use the playground page. The engine is dokuwiki.

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