Welcome to the Big Lab 1 Series lab. For this lab I aimed to use as many of the technologies that are tested on for the CCNA exam as well as throw in some CCNP level tech as well. (although only with simply configs)
The Lab as it stands at the beginning of this series consists of 15 routers. To get more specific to help you plan your hardware setup for this lab this is what im using:
- Mid 2009 Macbook Pro unibody
- Non-stock WD 500GB 7400 RPM disk
- 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
- Im using the 3640 router for all router instances with the following IOS: c3640-i-mz.124-12.bin
This allows me fairly decent performance with room to run more routers if needed. If you don't have equal or better hardware you could break the lab up into blocks and work with different parts individually. Also obviously while I'm using the lab I'm not running anything else CPU or memory intensive like a virtual machine.
As you build the lab I find it a very good idea to separate the router instances up into different dynamips processes. Typically I tend to put three routers per process, and I create a specific process for switches including the frame relay switches. You do this by editing the xxx.net file for the lab. For an example scroll to the bottom of this page.
The lab consists of the following:
- RIP
- OSPF
- Multi area
- Over NBMA
- Authentication, cleartext and MD5
- EIGRP
- DHCP
- BGP
- PPP
- ACLs
- VLSM
I'll be adding more things in as I go such as NAT etc. At current I'm Using ACLs to control traffic to my host machine, using the "cloud" and netcat to listen on which ever port I wish.
Rather then go over the base commands we'll be using on every router of the lab, I'll put them below here using R1 as the example. You would use this same set of commands for each router as you go along, changing the hostname command where appropriate.
Router>enable
Router#configure terminal
Router(config)#hostname R1
R1(config)#enable secret cisco
R1(config)#username bob password cisco
R1(config)#service password-encryption
R1(config)#no ip domain-lookup
R1(config)#line console 0
R1(config-line)#logging synchronous
R1(config-line)#exec-timeout 0 0
The most critical of these commands for our lab is the exec-timeout 0 0. GNS3/dynamips will spike the CPU usage if the session timeouts out to the console of the router. Be setting the exec timeout to 0 0, where telling it to never timeout. Trust me if you forget this with more than 5 routers running you will definitely notice it.
[localhost:7202]
workingdir = /tmp
udp = 12000
[[3640]]
chassis = 3640
image = /Users/jason/Tools/IOS/Cisco_3640/c3640-i-mz.124-12.bin
ram = 64
ghostios = True
sparsemem = True
idlepc = 0x605bcff8
[[ROUTER R15]]
model = 3640
console = 2015
cnfg = /Users/jason/GNS3_Labs/Big Lab 1/biglab1_configs/R15.cfg
slot0 = NM-4E
e0/0 = SW5 1
x = -354.733585441
y = 419.941738243
[[ROUTER R12]]
model = 3640
console = 2012
cnfg = /Users/jason/GNS3_Labs/Big Lab 1/biglab1_configs/R12.cfg
slot0 = NM-4T
s0/0 = R10 s0/2
s0/1 = R11 s0/2
x = -180.0
y = -432.0
[[ROUTER R1]]
model = 3640
console = 2000
cnfg = /Users/jason/GNS3_Labs/Big Lab 1/biglab1_configs/R1.cfg
slot0 = NM-4T
s0/0 = R4 s0/2
slot1 = NM-4E
e1/0 = SW1 1
x = -158.810823509
y = 49.7698829841
[localhost:7203]
workingdir = /tmp
udp = 13000
[[3640]]
chassis = 3640
image = /Users/jason/Tools/IOS/Cisco_3640/c3640-i-mz.124-12.bin
ram = 64
ghostios = True
sparsemem = True
idlepc = 0x605bcff8
[[ROUTER R3]]
model = 3640
console = 2002
cnfg = /Users/jason/GNS3_Labs/Big Lab 1/biglab1_configs/R3.cfg
slot1 = NM-4E
e1/0 = SW1 3
e1/1 = R2 e1/1
x = -20.4729412282
