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You don't need to have a terminal server - sometimes people
call it an access server - but it's handy.
In case you're not familiar with this term, what is this?
In my office here at INE I've got a little real mini rack I've put together.
It's got, I think, three routers and two switches in it.
And it's useful, but what's irritating to me is that
I don't have a terminal server in that little mini lab.
What that means is when I want to change my console connection I have to
physically turn around, unplug the console port from Switch 1, plug it in Switch 2.
When I'm done with that, unplug it from Switch 2. plug it into Router 1.
I have to physically move the console port around.
Like I said, it's kind of irritating.
If that bothers you, for about $120 to $140
you can buy a Cisco 2509 or 2511.
These are routers that are end-of-sale.
Cisco hasn't sold these in a million years,
but they're still available as used products on eBay and other sites.
And you can use this as a terminal server.
Terminal server is a router that has a bunch of low-speed serial interfaces
and it's got a special cable that comes out of it called an Octal cable.
So you'll need to buy the Octal cable along with this.
An Octal cable, it's a cable that's got a big, fat connector on it.
You plug it in and it's got eight cables that come out of it.
And each one of those cables connects into the console ports
of the various devices you have in your rack.
So what you can do is you can connect to the console port of the terminal server,
and then from there get into the console ports of any of your routers
or switches without physically having to plug and unplug your console cables.
So it's just a convenience device,
but if you've got the money to buy one it certainly will make your life easier.
Don't think about resale value.
Cisco equipment is not an investment.
It's not like buying a house, or diamonds or something.
This stuff goes down in value super-fast.
I mean, you can buy routers out there nowadays for $40 or $50
that when you bought them brand new were $2,000.
So if you plan on reselling this when you're done,
you're going to take a hit.
So if you're spending $500 right now on building your rack,
you might get $150 back when you turn around and sell it,
so just consider that money gone.
Also, don't just take my word for it.
Before you do any of this stuff, research a lot of other articles.
Just google, "build Cisco home lab."
Use those four keywords, "build Cisco home lab,"
and you will find lots of articles on there giving various different
piece of advice of how to go about doing this.
I would recommend before you lay down a single penny,
not only watching this video but reading a minimum of three other
articles, just to get a well-rounded advice,
make sure you hit all the bullet points,
then I think you'll be well-prepared to start your planning and your designing.
Lastly, this might happen.
You might have planned as much as possible,
prepared as much as possible, created your spreadsheets, and at the
end of the day, your lab doesn't support something.
There's some feature that you just overlooked,
some interface you neglected to buy.
Don't beat yourself up.
Don't bang your head against the wall.
You could go out and buy another piece of equipment to supplement
your rack to support that feature, but at that point,
if it's just one or two things that your rack isn't supporting,
it might just be more financially beneficial for you to rent some
rack time on INE's rack or somebody else's rack, because maybe
you can just spend three or four hours practicing that one feature,
and that only costs you maybe $100 investment of tokens or something,
which is less than buying the two or three routers, or additional
two or three switches you would need yourself to practice that.
So consider that.
Hopefully your home rack will support pretty much everything you need,
but if it doesn't, you can always supplement
it with rack time somewhere else.
Elizabeth asked a good question.
I'm actually going to make this live, because I want
anybody else to weigh in on this as well.
She says she's a Cisco partner, so that's great.
So Elizabeth, that means you've got access to IOS, which is awesome.
You're looking at building a combination routing and switching
and collaboration home lab. What budget would you recommend?
You don't know the routing and switching side very well.
I don't know collaboration, so I can't speak to that.
So I can't really talk to you about what devices you'll need to buy to
turn this into a collaboration rack, or how much those devices will cost you.
From a routing and switching perspective,
just off the top of my head, I would say for $600 you should be able to
buy a pretty decent routing and switching rack.
A lot of these routers that I showed you that we have in our rack, like
the 2011s and the 1841s, you can buy those for $50 to $80 on eBay.
A lot of the switches you can buy for $120, $130 dollars.
So I'm just estimating that if you buy three switches
and four routers, and the various cables and stuff, and a hub,
you should be able to do all of that for $600 bucks or less - rough estimate.
Somebody else might be able to chime in on what additional things
you'd need for collaboration and how much those might cost you,
if any of those of you who are watching have already gone down that path.
Let's see here. So Mary asks, can you get by with just two 3560s and a 3550,
or would you get rid of the 3550 and get all 3560s?
Short answer is yes.
I think that what you're proposing is fine.
If you have a couple of 3560s, I'd recommend you have at least two 3560s,
and then a third switch can be pretty much whatever you want.
But you are going to want at least two switches that support
your private VLANs, your DHCP snooping and all of that stuff.
You're going to want at least two switches that do that.
Ideally three, but if you've already got a 3550,
or if you can get your hands on a 3550, that's fine.
That'll be fine for your third switch, because that can still do routing.
3550s can still do your EIGRP, and OSPF
and stuff like that, they just can't do some of the more advanced
security features, but if you've got two other switches that can,
that should be good enough.
So that's fine.
Someone's asking about the CCIE level.
When I was practicing for my CCIE, I basically used a rack that was
similar to what we have here - that had four or five routers in it
and three switches - and I found that to be perfectly sufficient.
This is, of course, talking about the routing and switching CCIE.
Here at INE, of course, if you log into our INE CCIE racks,
which I'll show you when we get to part two here,
they're much larger topologies - which is great, gives you a lot of flexibility.
But if you're building your own home lab,
you don't need to build a home lab that's got 10 or 15 routers in it and 8 switches.
Great if you can, but, I think, for CCIE level,
you'd probably want an absolute minimum of five routers.
I can't see being able to do some of the more complex filtering and
summarization and redistribution topologies with anything less than
five routers, and a minimum of three switches.
Keep in mind, if those three switches are full multilayer switches,
you've basically got a topology of eight routers - five routers and
three multilayer switches gives you eight routers,
and you can do all kinds of stuff with that.
I would say that's the minimum. And that should be fine
for doing all of your routing and switching CCIE level stuff.
Someone's mentioning that their V4 CCIE routing and
switching home lab cost them $2000.
I'd be curious, Howard, if you could tell us the quantity of routers
and switches that you have in your lab that led up to that,
and also if all that stuff was used or if you bought any of that
stuff new. Certainly new stuff will ratchet up the price very,
very quickly. Ah, Michael's got a good point here.
I'll make sure this is all visible.
He says, for Cisco partners there is the NFR program,
where you can get some devices refurbished from Cisco direct at a steep discount.
So for those of you who are Cisco partners that's also something
you might want to look into as well.
Yeah, John has a good point.
If you buy a router as a terminal server, that's another router.
Not only do you have that octal cable coming out to connect
to the console ports, but that terminal server should have probably
at least two FastEthernet interfaces in it.
So that's another router that you can add into your topology. Exactly, exactly.
3750s are great. Yes, certainly, if you can have a stack of two or
three 3750s, now you can practice switch stacks as well.
That's also going to require that you buy that special stack cable.
I've never looked for that on eBay. I'm sure somebody sells that used as well.
So 3750s, they're a little bit pricier.
So 3750s, even used, cost a little bit more than 3560s do.
So you have to ask yourself, is that additional benefit of doing switch stacking
worth the extra $40 to $60 per switch that I'm going to spend? It's your choice.
Jeremy's mentioning, the backbone router ID has always confused me.
What is the purpose, to serve as a WAN?
Should this be connected to the Internet?
So, here when you log into, not just INE's racks,
but most companies that give you the ability to purchase time on their
racks, usually will have at least one router that's called a backbone router.
The purpose of the backbone router is, when you log into the rack,
you will have access to some routers and switches that you can
pretty much do anything on.
You can configure it, you can wipe out the configuration,
you can do whatever.
But they are probably going to want to have,
in the background, other routers, maybe switches,
that you don't have access to.
Like in our case.
In our CCNA/CCNP rack.
One of our backbone routers is configured as a frame relay switch.
So it's always preconfigured with PBCs, with DLCI numbers.
We don't want you to have access to that, because that one router
is serving as a frame relay switch for lots of different racks.
There's five different racks that all feed into that one frame relay
switch, and so we don't want people getting in there and messing it up.
There's another backbone router that's in the rack which is being
used to inject routes into your rack.
So for example, when you're going through the route workbook,
when you're doing the EIGRP and the OSPF tasks, you will notice that
once you configure EIGRP and OSPF all of a sudden magically you're
seeing EIGRP routes, and you're seeing OSPF routes, because that backbone
router in the background is injecting that in there.
And we don't want you having access to that to mess that up, because that's
not only serving your rack, but other people as well.
So usually the concept of a backbone router is simply, it's a device
that is untouchable by you, that's been pre-configured by somebody
else to inject something into your rack.
Now, certainly, if you're building a home-based lab,
you don't need that concept.
You're going to have access to everything.
So a backbone router is really only something you would see conceptually
in remote racks that you're logging into.
John asks a good question right here.
How do you switch back and forth between console access and being
on the actual network?
Two cables are going to the terminal router.
In my particular case, when I'm doing it here in my office-- your
laptop has probably a WiFi connection.
I use WiFi here while I'm on the actual network, and my
console connections via my USB port.
So it's two completely different interfaces on my laptop.
I'm doing just asking and doing regular text through the USB port as console,
but all of my frame data, my Ethernet frames going to the
corporate network are either going through my Ethernet cable,
which connects to the corporate network, or via WiFi.
So the two are completely different,
my laptop does not get confused.
John asked, would you advise purchasing a terminal server over
a console access server?
I'm personally not exactly sure what the difference is between the two.
In my mind, I've seen people interchangeably use the term,
terminal server and access server.
Back when I worked at Cisco, in our labs,
our 2509s and our 2511s, we called them terminal servers.
That's what connected the console ports.
When I came here to INE, the racks we have here,
they call them access servers.
So, I'm not sure if you're thinking of something else.
Okay, great, Howard.
So I'll make that visible there. So Howard had previously mentioned that
his CCIE rack that he built cost roughly two grand, and right there
he's mentioning what that rack consisted of.
So for those of you who are watching this recorded a month or six
months from now, so Howard built a rack consisting of it looks like
roughly four switches, a couple 3560s, a couple of 3750s.
He had three 1841s, two 3825s, four 2600 XM. So you basically had
four, five, six. So you had nine routers.
And then you had a 2511 as an access server.
And then a couple of actual racks as well.
So you had nine routers, four switches and an access server,
and that cost you roughly $2,000.
Alfonzo, I don't have any answer for you about the CCIE security path,
because I have not pursued that certification, so maybe somebody
else can chime in on that, but I'm not sure what hardware you would
need to build a rack for that.
John clarified his question. So John was wondering, if I want to use
my laptop for two things, if I want my laptop on the one hand to
be sending actual data into my rack, maybe I'm using some package
generator software and I want to send data into my rack,
and at the exact same time I want my laptop to have actual real internet
access to my DSL modem or something, how do I do that?
The way I have done it in the past is I use my hard-wire Ethernet
cable to connect to my rack, and that's where I did like my package
generation stuff. I use my WiFi connection to connect to my home
WiFi network, and what you have to tweak is you actually have to
go into-- let me see here if I can show it to you.
I can only speak to Microsoft here, I can't speak to those
of you who are using MACs.
But here, and I think you'll see it,
if I use the command-- let me expand this a little bit.
If I use the command route print scroll up.
So right now my laptop actually does have a hard-wired Ethernet connection
into INEs corporate network, and I also have a Wi-Fi connection
into INEs corporate network.
And you'll see I have two default routes.
So what you'd want to do is, in your particular case, if my hard-wired
Ethernet connection was going to my rack, I'd want to make sure that
my default route I only had one of them, and that my default
route was pointing to my Wi-Fi connection.
So you'd want to use like the route delete command in DOS to delete
the default route that's pointing out your Ethernet cable, because in
reality, that's not a valid default route to get to external networks.
That's only going to your own internal network.
So as long as you delete that, and then you might want to add a static
route in DOS into the network you've got built into your home lab.
And then just keep one single default route, which is the default
route pointing out your WiFi connector, which gives you
your actual real internet connectivity.
So that's how you want to accomplish that.
Can't speak to how pricey a basic voice lab.
That goes back to collaboration.
Somebody else was asking how much a collaboration lab would cost.
One other question and then we'll take a break here.
So Steven's asking, is it worth mentioning talking about an IP power
distribution unit, so you can power cycle remotely?
That's really your choice.
You have to ask yourself this question,
do you foresee that once you've got this lab built and running in
your house - in your bedroom, your garage,
or wherever it's going to be - do you foresee yourself needing
to access this lab remotely?
Do you foresee yourself working from your actual office
and needing to get into this lab?
If the answer to that is yes, then yeah,
you'll probably want to get an IP power distribution unit so you
can remotely power cycle your equipment.
If you don't think you're ever going to need that,
if you say to yourself, Well, the only time I'm ever going to access
this equipment is actually when I'm right there physically in
front of it, then no, you obviously wouldn't need that.
The other thing is, if you are going to access your lab remotely,
now you've got to think about, Okay, my terminal server is probably
now going to become a necessity. It's no longer optional,
I'm going to have to have one. And that terminal server is going to
have to have a public IP address so I can get to it from the outside world.
That opens up a whole other ball of worms, is how you get a
public static IP address on your terminal server so you can get to it
from your office, or from when you're vacationing in Hawaii or whatever.
So that's also something you'd have to think about is how to accomplish that.
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