Hello,

People who have errors like "209-unable to start VM instance 'ghost--localhost.ghost'" or related must know that Dynamips on Windows doesn't support Unicode (the short answer is that Cygwin is not Unicode-aware, so things that might work in Linux will not necessarily work on Cygwin).

You must not use 2 bytes characters (commonly found Chinese, Korean, Japanese etc... languages). Try to use only ascii characters in all your paths.

On Linux there is no such problem, you can also use GNS3 as a client on Windows with a remote hypervisor that run on Linux (GNS3 v0.6 has an improved Unicode support, so maybe it will not work for previous versions).

I've tried a modified version of Cygwin that support UTF-8 ( http://www.okisoft.co.jp/esc/utf8-cygwin/ ) but Dynamips crashs with it. So at the moment there is no solution.

Hope this will answer many of you questions about common errors.

_________________
Jeremy, GNS3 Programmer & Benevolent Dictator for Life.

Hi,

If you will run GNS with root you will not face this problem. i.e run gns3 through command : gksudo gns3. Thats it! I was so much exhausted with this error as i can not leave neither ubunut nor Gns3 :).
Try it and share feedback, it works perfect for me!

--
Bilal Sultan
Islamabad,Pakistan.

Hi,

I have installed the latest version of GNS and I have a windows Xp SP3 installed in it. Everything is fine to the point wherein I drag the router and try to start the same. It does not start and when I again try to restart the same I get an error "209 - Unable to start the Vm on r1"

Please provide a solution at the earliest.

Neel

hm! thanks...

I had this issue as well, but for me I noticed that I had the wrong IOS. For instance, I plugged in the c3700 and thought it was correct, but not realizing that I plugged in the c3700 IOS for a switch and not a router. After plugging in the correct router IOS everything worked.

Hope this helps someone. :-)