History

 

Marionnet was born in April 2005 as a simple textual interface to Netkit, itself based on User Mode Linux, written in OCaml by Jean-Vincent Loddo at the Paris 13 University for his own networking course. The code has since been completely rewritten and redesigned in September 2005, in order to remove the dependency from Netkit and to ease the construction of a graphical interface, partly built on dot (graphviz). The architecture was further extended and the system made more general when Luca Saiu joined the project in 2007, contributing in particular to the dynamic reconfiguration aspects.
The system is now in active use in several universities in Metropolitan France and other countries.

Current development
Marionnet has reached a fairly stable state and is being successfully used for teaching networks in several universities around the world. The current development is centered around making the system easier to use for the average end user, with a particular emphasis on documentation. The application is now internationalized through GNU Gettext.
So far Marionnet has been presented at two international Computer Science conferences, many French events and at FOSDEM.
In 2010, in order to relieve our burden as system administrators, we moved some of the development resources to Launchpad.
In the future we plan to have official Marionnet packages included in major distributions.