netmango 0.1.0

A user-friendly Linux network emulator.

A user-friendly Linux Network Emulator.

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Why Netmango?

This started back when I was a fresh ICT master's student, helping out on a remote-controlled vehicle project. The robot talked to its operator over Wi-Fi, and on paper everything worked great. However, but the moment we drove it a little further away, or around an obstacle, the robot started behaving funny.

To make the control loop more robust, we needed a way to reproduce those messy links on demand. Although Linux has a netem for this, but it turns out very unfriendly to use: long commands, easy to mistype, and if you forget to undo your rule your Wi-Fi just stays broken.

So I built Netmango: a small, friendly Python app that lets you emulate and monitoring the messy real-world network conditions your device will actually face out in the wild 🥭. With it you can:

• pick the interface you want to mess with,
• add delay, jitter, packet loss, and corruption with a few clicks,
• watch your link quality and throughput live while you test,
• and just close the window when you're done — Netmango cleans up after itself, no leftover rules.

Say goodbye to wrestling with netem.

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APP Screenshot

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Quick start

Option A — install from PyPI (recommended)

pip install netmango
sudo netmango        # tc/netem requires root

Option B — run from a clone

# Clone the repo
cd netmango
./start.sh

That's it. start.sh will:

1. Create .venv/ if it doesn't exist.
2. Install the project in editable mode on the first run.
3. Launch the GUI (python -m netmango).

To stop, just click the ×. Netmango automatically removes any rule it applied.

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Prerequisites

Netmango runs on Linux and relies on a few common system packages.

System packages

On Debian / Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y \
    python3 python3-venv python3-pip \
    iproute2 iputils-ping \
    libxcb-cursor0 libxcb-xinerama0

Sudo

Netmango uses tc, which is a Linux kernel feature and needs root, so it will prompt for your sudo password the first time you apply a rule.

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Author

I'm Mengge Zhang, an ICT master's student at KU Leuven. Netmango is a personal project, fully open source. I like to use what I learned to solve realworld challenges. Happy shaping! 🥭

I'm currently looking for opportunities to pursue a PhD, so feel free to get in touch!