A network monitoring tool such as Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal) is
invaluable when debugging problems with the real network connections. It is a
graphical traffic analyzer that can analyze most common network protocols.
Wireshark is available from
http://www.wireshark.com.
There are some pitfalls one might encounter when trying to connect a simulated
network to a real one:
- Trying to access the simulation host
- Accessing the
simulation host from the simulated network, or the other way around, is only
supported with port forwarding and host connection. It is difficult—sometimes
impossible—to access the simulation host from the simulated network when
setting up an Ethernet bridging connection.
- Simulated OS has no route
- When using a NAPT
connection and the operating system of the simulated machine does not have a
correct route to the real network, the simulated machine will drop the packets
or send them to the wrong address. To view the routing setup on the simulated
machine, use the command
netstat -r on Linux or route print on Windows.
Note that these commands should be executed on the simulated machines. The
simulated OS should have a default route to the service node.
- Simics uses the wrong host network interface
- On a
host with multiple network interfaces installed, Simics will only use one of
them for a real network connection. If the default selection is incorrect, use
the interface argument of the connect command to select the desired network
interface. See the previous section Selecting Host Ethernet
Interface.