Build a datacenter on your laptop - an introduction and realtime examples of simulated networks
Setting up a realistic network used to mean racks of hardware, an expensive license or a heavy VM appliance. Today a laptop is enough. This talk shows how to build complete, reproducible networks from a single YAML file with containerlab, and how to watch every packet in them live in Wireshark via Edgeshark, without installing anything beyond Docker and VS Code. Starting from an empty laptop, we deploy a small network with a client, DNS and a TLS web server, capture its traffic from any container interface, then turn it into a DHCP-driven setup and see what the protocol really does on the wire. The second half shows how the same setup becomes a training tool: faults are built into the lab on purpose, and trainees have to find them with Wireshark, the way they would in production.