What is Netkit?

Netkit is a project for creating virtual network devices (routers, switches, servers etc) which can be connected to form a full network on a single host machine. This can be useful for running network related experiments or for education. Netkit machines are User-mode Linux instances which are lightweight and do not require root access to run. To get started have a look at the Install Guide.

Netkit-JH is a fork of the Netkit-NG project, which is a fork of the original Netkit project. The Netkit-JH fork aimed to update Netkit-NG which stopped development in 2014 and sought to use a modern Debian distribution and kernel.

Development of Netkit-JH

We have guides on getting started with development and how to contribute to the Netkit project on github.

Netkit-JH Alternatives

Kathara is an alternative to netkit which uses Docker containers rather than User-mode Linux instances for 'virtualised' network devices. This project is maintained by the original developers of the Netkit project.

We recommend that unless you have a requirement for User-mode Linux, you should look at Kathara before attempting to use Netkit-JH. Additionally, the original Netkit and Netkit-NG projects contain earlier filesystems and kernels than those of Netkit-JH.