GNS3-"Bridging" gns3 router to LAN with wlan adapter(laptop friendly)

[iproute]

I recently had need to run GNS3 on my laptop, connected to my LAN so my other workstations could communicate with it. Now I'm not keen on tethering myself down with an ethernet cable to do this and using my traditional method of adding a bridge adapter, tap adapter, then putting eth0 and tap0 into the bridge - will not work with wlan adapters. You end up with a message similar to the one below;

darkside-ng ~ # brctl addif br0 wlan0
can't add wlan0 to bridge br0: Operation not supported

Here is a method that will work equally well. I say "bridged" because really this is a 'routed' solution. First you'll need to install GNS3, user-mode linux utilities, and your IOS image. For the IOS you could try a google search such as

inurl:ciscoios c2600

root@bt:~# apt-get install gns3
root@bt:~# apt-get install uml-utilities
root@bt:~# tunctl
root@bt:~# ifconfig tap0 172.16.36.1/24
root@bt:~# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Now start up GNS3, and add your IOS image. Add a router and start it. Make sure to calculate an Idle-PC value(right click on the router), otherwise your CPU will be under a heavy load when it does not need to be. Add a cloud device and bridge it to tap0 on the nio_tap tab(right click>configure on cloud device) by typing in tap0 and hitting the add button. Use a fast ethernet link between the router and the cloud device. Now console into your router from the right click menu.

Router> enable
Router# conf t
Router(config)#int fa0/0
Router(config-if)#ip address 172.16.36.254 255.255.255.0
Router(config-if)#no shut
Router(config-if)#exit
Router(config)#ip route 192.168.25.0 255.255.255.0 172.16.36.1
Router(config)#ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.25.1
Router(config)#ip name-server 8.8.8.8

Now for your other workstations on the network to communicate with the device, you'll need to log into your router and add a static route for the tap0 virtual router subnet. Here is the linux command to do so as it is a nice way to describe the route. The gateway in this case is your workstation IP address. This command below is NOT meant to be run in backtrack but describes the static route that you'd need to add to your physical router. Clearly in this example my physical LAN subnet is 192.168.25.0/24.

route add -net 172.16.36.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.25.57