Status Of Cisco Lab

The truth might be that there are a few sites offering what they call 'free cisco labs', but beware that there is always a catch.

Before we started on the lab, we did our research and found that all sites that said they offered 'free cisco lab access' had one or two small labs which were free, but then you had to pay up to get to play with the real equipment which involved Layer 3 switches, 2600 and 3600 series routers and a lot more.

While most 'companies' - because we are talking about money making sites, use these techniques so they can catch users looking for such services, feed them a bit of 'freebies' and hope that they will turn into 'profitable' clients.

We however distinguish from this whole 'plan' by miles. We are giving away access to the whole labs for free - regardless of the equipment we are going to use.

If your going to sit and compare sites that offer 'free' access to one or two routers, with what we are going here, then 1) you obviously haven't caught the 'firewall.cx spirit', 2) your a newbie to this site or 3) your blind (no offense).

And just to start unfolding what's happening behind the scene, we are on hold waiting for our ADSL connection so we can host the lab and begin our beta testing, while concurrently continuing to purchase more equipment so we can get at least 2 labs online when we officially open the lab to the public.

Current list of equipment include:
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7 x 1600 routers with serial and isdn BRI s/t interfaces
1 x 3524XL 24 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports with 2 Fiber optic Gigabit modules (Gbics)
1 x 2950-12E-G 12 10/100 fast Ethernet ports with 2 Fiber optic Gigabit modules (Gbics)
1 x 2600 router with one isdn BRI s/t interface, Ethernet interface and a hardware compression module (AIM)
1 x 2600 router with a 4 port isdn BRI s/t network module (used for backup lines), a serial 1T interface and Ethernet interface
1 x 1912 switch with 12 10Mbit interfaces and 2 100Mibit uplinks
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We are slowly building up our equipment according to our lab's overall progress. It's not an easy task, and at the same time a very expensive one - I assure you that the above equipment has already exceeded $3,500 US.

Diagrams on the actual labs we are planning to create will be posted shortly for your information.

I think that just about does it.

Cheers,

I did say 'shortly' ..... so here are the first 4 Cisco Labs we have in plan.

Please do keep in mind that these can & might change depending on hardware availability and resouces, but we'll do our best to keep to the original plans.









Cheers,

Wow Chris, this is unbeliveble. You guys are just fkn great!

But I was wondering, how do you get the money to buy this stuff? I mean where's the funding coming from? I'm new here but I haven't noticed one ad on this whole site.


And yeah, does anybody know about a good Cisco tutorial for total beginners?

First of all, my comment wasn't meant as an attack just wanted to correct the whole first free cisco lab deal. It may not be the first but it is the most fully featured free one Sahir, r1r2 was indeed real routers, they had five labs, 3 routers each. There was no booking system, you would telnet in select the lab you wanted and if it was free it would let you in. I was wondering if you planned on providing true console access or just telnet with your labs? I'm setting up my own cisco lab over the next few weeks . I'm attemting to setup true console acccess over telnet. I will also attempt to setup password recovery procedures so if someone before you mucks up the passwords the next person will be able to powercycle the routers and do password recovery. I'm still trying to figure out how to acomplish this on the switches since the password recovery procesdure dosen't involve sending a break signal across the console line. I will probably have to physically modify the switches. It sounds more complicated than it is.

Cianid3, first off - my apologies for being rather rough on you.. I'd spent a particularly harrowing day on some work, coupled with misunderstanding your post.. anyway..

We've had similar issues that you're talking about with regard to the lab setup.. our solution involves RADIUS and a TFTP server, however you can get into the exact details with Chris as he's wrestling with that side (unfortunately Greece and India are not walking distance away, or I would stand there and provide moral support while he does all the heavy lifting )

Cheers,

MezzUp, as far as money is concerned, you're right, the site runs more or less ad-free (unless you count Amazon book links and the like). While there have been offers to buy out the site, they have been turned down before as the goal here is not to make money off it.

What can I say, some people just have a real passion for technology.

Plus its a great learning experience for us to do stuff like this as well.


Cheers all,