We are going to continue our setup of our emulated network using EVE-NG and then hopefully get some devices deployed and start thinking about how we can automate the configuration of these devices. On [Day 25](day25.md) we covered the installation of EVE-NG onto our machine using VMware Workstation.
There is also a client pack that allows us to choose which application is used when we SSH to the devices. It will also set up Wireshark for packet captures between links. You can grab the client pack for your OS (Windows, macOS, Linux).
This step has been a challenge, I have followed some videos that I will link at the end that links to some resources and downloads for our router and switch images whilst telling us how and where to upload them.
Overall the steps here are a little complicated and could be much easier but the above blogs and videos walk through the process of adding the images to your EVE-NG box.
Inside the EVE-NG web interface, we are going to create our new network topology. We will have four switches and one router that will act as our gateway to outside networks.
From here you will have a long list of node options, If you have followed along above you will have the two in blue shown below and the others are going to be grey and unselectable.
We now need to add our connectivity between our routers and switches. We can do this quite easily by hovering over the device and seeing the connection icon as per below and then connecting that to the device we wish to connect to.
When you have finished connecting your environment you may also want to add some way to define physical boundaries or locations using boxes or circles which can also be found in the right-click menu. You can also add text which is useful when we want to define our naming or IP addresses in our labs.
You will also notice that the lab above is all powered off, we can start our lab by selecting everything and right-clicking and selecting start selected.
Once we have our lab up and running you will be able to console into each device and you will notice at this stage they are pretty dumb with no configuration. We can add some configuration to each node by copying or creating your own in each terminal.
Most of the examples I am using here as I am not a Network Engineer have come from this extensive book which is not free but I am using some of the scenarios to help understand Network Automation.
