No network on WANem (Citrix XenServer)

Author : Ingmar Verheij

WANem is (as the name implies) a WAN emulator that’s available for free and therefor ideal to use in a lab environment. WANem is built on the Knoppix distribution and supplied as a bootable ISO or a virtual appliance. Unfortunately the virtual appliance is only provided for the VMware hypervisor.

I’ve got a lab built on the Citrix XenServer hypervisor and should therefore use the ISO. Installing (or actually booting) WANem is no rocket science, using it is a bit more complex. A guy named José Luis Gómez Ferrer de Couto has written an easy to understand  tutorial  (in Spanish) how to use WANem in Citrix XenServer.

Unfortunately there is a small pitfall on my Citrix XenServer 5.6 machine, the network is unreachable.

Although the NIC of the WANem virtual machine does request (and get) an DHCP lease, there is no network activity.

The reason there is no network activity is that the NIC is inactive. After enabling the network interface in the console of the virtual machine, everything works just fine.

After booting WANem, and configuring the basics, the folowing commands are issued.

exit2shell

ifconfig eth0 up
ifconfig eth1 up

This result would look like this:

You can download WANem here.