Olive to Olive Communication

Getting Juniper Olives to chat to each other is quite easy, if you’re building your virtual Olive network as a lab for seeing protocols in action then you can set up your virtual interfaces with no protocols exposed to Windows and you’ll have a clean connection.

Using Wireshark you can capture on the virtual interface and see the protocols sloshing about in their native form.

I’m assuming you have built yourself a couple (or more) of Olives as discussed here and here. A quick way of creating more than one olive is to duplicate the hard drive images, there’s a good tutorial here for that but basically:

• Shutdown your Olive and power off the VM.
• Clone your existing .vdi following the tutorial above.
• Build a new VM and use the cloned .vdi as your HDD.
• Boot and be so happy you nip down the pub for half hour.

Once done return to VirtualBox and select File->Properties then open the network item on the left.

You may already have a VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter listed in which case you can skip this step. If you don’t or you want to connect more than one Olive together over different virtual LANs then use the icon on the right to add a new adaptor.

Now open Windows Control Panel and view your network adaptors, open the one you just created (or the one that was created for you) and de-select everything. Here’s what mine looks like:

Return to VirtualBox and edit the properties of the first Olive you want to connect then select network and enable a new adaptor (if you used Adaptor 1 for installation and general IP connectivity to the host then it’ll be Adaptor 2) and configure as follows:

• Attached To: Host-only Adapter.
• Name: Select your newly created adaptor.
• Advanced: Default (Should be Intel PRO/1000MT).

OK that and then select the second Olive you want to connect to the first and select the same Host-only Adaptor settings as the first. The only exception is the Mac Address which should be different.

Once done bring up both olives and you should have a second “em” interface to play with, configure an IP DMZ on both sides and retire to the pub for a second time safe in the knowledge of a job well done.

Because you cleared out all the Windows services attached to the network adaptor your packet captures should be totally free from extraneous fluff as follows: