Desktop

Overview

The Desktop node type is used for running a host VM with a graphical desktop.

Features

The refplat ISO includes a desktop VM image, which is an Alpine Linux VM with an XFCE graphical desktop. The VM has a Firefox browser pre-installed for interacting with web interfaces that may be running on other nodes in your lab. The VM also includes these tools for network troubleshooting:

  • wireshark
  • iperf -- basic traffic generation
  • routem -- OSPF/BGP control plane traffic generation
  • tcpdump -- packet capture
  • traceroute
  • ping
  • telnet
  • ssh
  • sshd - SSH daemon, configured to start when the node boots

Using Desktop Nodes in CML

The desktop VM image on the refplat ISO has a locked root account. An initial user account will be created when the VM boots. By default, a cisco account with password cisco is created. You can override the username and password for this initial user account by setting the USERNAME and/or PASSWORD in the Edit Config pane for the node in the Workbench.

To access the graphical desktop of a running node, select the node in the Workbench and then click the VNC tab in the lower pane.

Configure the node the same way you would an Alpine node. Shell commands in the configuration field of the node are just sourced as user root when the node starts up. This approach is based on Alpine Linux. For more information, see the Alpine Linux wiki.

Configuration example:

# this is a shell script which will be sourced at boot
hostname desktop-0
# configurable user account
USERNAME=cisco
PASSWORD=cisco
# configure networking
ifconfig eth1 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add -net 10.0.0.0/8 dev eth1