So you're going to [want to?] have a long Ethernet cable to connect your laptop
to that hub and then to all the devices in your rack.
I will stress this again, buy a hub.
I'm not talking about a switch. I'm talking about a real old-fashioned hub.
You probably can't buy them new.
I don't think any of the electronic stores like Best Buy or Circuit City
even sell hubs these days.
But you should be able to go onto eBay and buy an old hub,
so that you can get those sniffer traces.
When you're actually implementing is when you're racking and stacking -
this is sort of common sense right here - put the heaviest items on the
bottom of the rack so it doesn't fall over and crush you.
Ensure that all the equipment fans have room to breathe.
Don't push everything right up against the wall where the fans are
just blowing their hot air right into the wall and it's reflecting
right back inside the fan again. You don't want that.
Make sure the fans have a little bit of space to blow all that hot air out.
If you plan on tying up your cables because you don't like messy cables,
use VELCRO ties.
You don't want to use stuff that's more permanent than that like
zip ties and stuff, because like it mentions here,
you're probably going to be re-cabling stuff
frequently to come up with new topologies.
You don't want to be snipping your zip ties to have to re-cable everything.
VELCRO ties are great for that.
Now we are in the operate stage.
It's at this stage you finally get to have fun.
You've purchased everything, you've stacked it, you've cabled it, you've turned it on.
Now you can actually start using it. Finally.
So some tips at the operating stage.
Don't leave your devices on 24 hours a day unless you enjoy paying
the electric company your hard earned money.
This stuff is going to draw a significant amount of electricity,
don't turn it on when you're not using it, save yourself your bill.
Make it a habit of saving your text files,
your configs to text files, prior to shutting off equipment.
Nothing more frustrating than you spend an hour and a half building
a really complex BGP topology with redistribution to EIGRP and OSPF
and all this stuff and then you shut off, you
go, oh my gosh, I just shut everything off,
I didn't save my configs.
Now you've got to rebuild it all when you start again from scratch.
So save your configs to text files so you can just
copy and paste them back in when you turn your stuff back on.
Make sure your cables don't pose a tripping hazard to yourself.
If you can, keep your door to your room open to keep your room cool.
If you keep that door closed, be prepared to
sweat. It's going to get really hot in there.
Make sure you dust regularly.
You don't want a lot of dust getting in there and frying out some
of the circuits in your routers and switches.
Some tips about hardware.
What we have here at INE is-- in case you're not familiar with this,
we have-- I told you we've got our CCIE racks,
but those are based on virtual routers which are tied into physical switches.
Then we have CCNA/CCNP racks, which use real routers and real switches,
I'll show you a diagram of what those look like in just a second.
So for those of you who are curious about how we built our racks,
this is what we're using.
Now I'm going to give you a little bit of disclaimer right here, that
a lot of this stuff is old, a lot of these network modules that
you see here are no longer sold, but that's good for you, because
if you try to replicate that, that means you
can buy this stuff real cheaply on eBay.
The stuff that Cisco is still selling right now,
you're going to find that is more expensive than the stuff that's
gone end-of-sale that they're no longer selling. That's the cheaper stuff.
This is what we've got. We've got a couple of 3845s.
One of those 3845s serves the purpose of our terminal server
as well as our frame relay switch. So that one router is doing dual purpose,
terminal server and frame relay switch. The
other 3845 is being used as a backbone router.
So in our particular implementation, that second 3845 is preconfigured for
BGP and OSPF and stuff, and it's injecting a lot routes into the rack.
And you can see here the various network modules we have that
support all of those serial interfaces we need for frame relay.
And then each rack has a couple of Cisco 2811s, and you can see here
the various modules in there, and a couple of 1841s.
The 2011s and 1841s, all of those are
configured with 15.x IOS. That's kind of nice.
In case you plan on following suit here, I provide a URL for you.
This is a great PDF.
If you open it up, it shows you a listing of all these router platforms
and just dozens and dozens and dozens of network modules and WIC cards
and what's supported in which particular platform.
If a WIC card or a network module is end of support / end of life,
it tells you what the replacement is. So a great PDF to have on hand.
As far as switches are concerned, currently, right now, at the time
I'm recording this, which is May 13th, 2005,
we have 3 switches. One of them is a 3560.
The other two are 3550s. But within the next two to three weeks,
we're going to be getting rid of those 3550s and swapping them out
for 3560s, so all three of them will be 3560s.
There's the particular model number in case you're curious. They're 24-port 3560s.
This is how our rack is put together right now.
If you were to recreate this at home, it's a total of 6 routers.
You've got the two backbone routers there plus
the four workgroup routers, and three switches.
You can see the various LAN and WAN cabling that we've got.
I've found that this topology, I can pretty
much tweak this to make any topology I want.
I've been able to come up with really complex BGP topologies,
and private VLANs, and all kinds of stuff using this.
If I was to build a home lab myself, I would
probably replicate this at a minimum.
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