Exposing Mininet hosts

This is a super minipost, but writing this down in case it helps anyone else.

Normally, if you have a mininet setup, the virtual network is completely cut-off from your host. Mininet "hosts" cannot talk to your host and vice versa.

To get around this, you need to add a single line in:

net.addNAT()

Now, your host gets an additional IP assigned in the Mininet address space. You can use this IP from inside your Mininet network to reach out and you can directly reach these hosts from your host using their IPs.