MiniNAM is a network animator for visualizing real-time packet flows in Mininet. It is a GUI based tool written in Python Tkinter. It provides real-time animation of any network created by the Mininet emulator. It includes all the components required to initiate, visualize and modify Mininet network flows in real-time.
MiniNAM allows dynamic modification of preferences and packet filters: a user can view selective flows with options to color code packets based on the source/destination node and/or packet type. This establishes MiniNAM as a very powerful tool for debugging network protocols or teaching, learning and understanding network concepts.
For more details, please refer to MiniNAM project and paper.
The last update of MiniNAM has been done in 2020. It does not support Python3, which is the mostly used Python version. Besides, it does not support ipmininet, which is a Mininet extention to support emulation of complex IP networks (including IPv6, router configuration, etc.). This fork aims at filling these two gaps.
When MiniNAM is launched, it starts or loads the Mininet network instance. It then starts a separate thread for the Tkinter GUI, and multiple threads to sniff packets on all the network interfaces in all network namespaces (one thread per network namespace) created by Mininet. For network namespace management, it relies on pyroute2 library that runs natively on Linux. Other platforms are not supported.
The GUI displays network nodes and links. If an outcoming packet is sniffed at any interface, it is displayed over the relevant link in GUI after applying user-specific preferences and filters. The speed of packet flow can be decreased, if needed, for better visibility. As there can be more than one flow in the network at a particular time, MiniNAM tries to identify packets that belong to the same flow and adds those packets to a separate FIFO queue for each flow. However, due to concurrency of multiple sniffing threads, it is important to add delays to all links in the network in order to preserve the packet order.
MiniNAM can be started using either using a topology defined in Mininet, or using a custom file.
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Start MiniNAM from CLI with a single command. E.g.
sudo python MiniNAM.py --topo tree,depth=2,fanout=2 --controller remoteTo make MiniNAM easier for Mininet users, arguments of MiniNAM have been kept the same as Mininet. This means that all the arguments that can be passed to
mnutility can be passed to MiniNAM too. A list of these arguments can be seen in help:sudo python MiniNAM.py --help -
Start MiniNAM from CLI and pass custom files. E.g.
sudo python MiniNAM.py --custom <custom_file_name>sudo python MiniNAM.py --custom <custom_file_name> --topo <topo_name>For example, to start a ipmininet topology with two hosts and a single router, the following command can be run:
sudo python MiniNAM.py --ipmininet --custom custom-ipmininet.py --topo mytopo