CISCO HOME LAB

[mitch54]

I am planning to buy cisco routers for practice at home. Anybody can give me an advice what to buy (economy is the clue here)? Thanks.

 

[robebrow]

It all depends on the capabilities you would like to incorporate into it.&nbsp;&nbsp;If it is just for router labs to mess with routing protocols the 2500 series would work great.&nbsp;&nbsp;If you plan to incorporate ISDN or different types of WIC WAN modules and dial up you will probably have to go to the 2600 series ($2600).&nbsp;&nbsp;The 2500 series you could probably pick up used at a semi-reasonable price.&nbsp;&nbsp;If you plan on setting up switches on it also you can probably get the 2820 used pretty reasonable.&nbsp;&nbsp;Hope this helps.<br><br>Rob Brown

 

[trevorh13]

You look at the Sybex Router Simulator. I used to study for my CCNA and found it to be very useful. It cost me about £70 from Amazon so was significantly cheaper than buying a pair of 2501's!

 

[wybnormal]

Let me start with my soap box about sims and lack of hands on training. With a sim you are very limited to what you can do. THey have their place to be sure.. sim'ing ISDN for example is a great idea vs buying the ISDN demostrator at 2k. But, you do not learn the cabling or other parts that are not common like policy routing, wildcard masking and the like.

The 2500s are the workhorse router and run about 500-700 on eBay. The 2514 is dual ethernet which is useful and the 2503 is ether,serial and ISDN. Try to get dual serial ports. The 1600s are great lab machines.. but they seem to run abit higher in price BUT they take up much less room and power. They also have the WIC slot for future use.

I run a 2514, 2503 and a 1601. I use both a couple of DSU/CSUs with a back to back T1 link and a DTE/DCE cable back to back. I also have a 1900 switch so I can have VLANs set up. All were bought used off eBay and one private party. You want no less then 8 meg of FLASH in the big routers.. and no less then a 4 meg flash card in the 1600s. 8 meg flash would be better. 8 meg of ram is plenty for a home lab.

There are virtual labs like Mentor which are great but after 3-4 labs and 80 bucks a pop, you could have bought the router.

The biggest issue is that when you go into the job market as a CCNA or whatever, you are *expected* to know certain things. Without the flexiblity of the real router to load different IOS levels, protocols etc, you have tied your hands. Same goes for the DSU/CSU configs, T1 hook ups, Frame Relay config and so on.

Mike S
&quot;Diplomacy; the art of saying 'nice doggie' till you can find a rock&quot; Wynn Catlin

 

[UNIX72]

I so much agree with wybnormal point. You really need hands on training!

 

[jeter]

I was thinking since we have so many routers in the lab that I might hook up a few modems and let users access them.
The problem is I do not know if this would be any kind of violation from cisco, perhaps I'll call them tomorrow and ask. hhmmm I wonder if I could charge users for this service, hehahah j/k.... Any comments or suggestions are
welcome. J.Fisher CCNA
Jeter@LasVegas.com

 

[wybnormal]

Already been done... Mentor has a very nice interface through the web. I've been thinking about the same using a Java based telnet applet in order to punch through firewalls.

Mike S
&quot;Diplomacy; the art of saying 'nice doggie' till you can find a rock&quot; Wynn Catlin