T1

heavyweight

Should I purchase a male and female V.35 cable DTE/DCE to emulate a T1?

Amazon.com: SF Cable, 6ft HD60 Male to V.35 Female (Cisco® CAB-V35FC-6): Computers & Accessories

clarson

you could, but that is a waste of money.
What you want to buy is a dce/dte back to back crossover cables such as this:
DTE DCE Back to Back Crossover Cable 1 Feet for Cisco Cab 6060 1 | eBay
that is for a one foot cable. The cables do come in longer lengths if you need something longer.
and, I just quickly pick that ebay listing out as an example. look around and you might find them for cheaper.

clarson

I take your looking a cables for serial wics for a home ccna lab. which the cable I pointed out above would be good.
another option is to buy serial wics that use a rj-45 connector (and make you own cables if you have a crimping tool. Those are even cheaper.
they would be the wic-1dsu-1t for 2600xm routers and wic-1dsu-1t v2 for 1800/2800 routers

TWX

It really depends on what interface controllers or devices you have. I ended up with a bunch of WIC-1T= and WIC-2T= cards so I bought DCE/DTE cables with HD60 and Smart Serial interfaces, depending on which cards were going into which routers. Some are HD60 to HD60, some are Smart Serial to Smart Serial, some are HD60 DCE to Smart Serial DTE, and some are Smart Serial DCE to HD60 DTE.

Personally I wouldn't go with cables as short as 1'. I have one 1' HD60 to HD60 that's really too short unless I rack my routers all right next to each other. I have several 2' various mix of ends, and one 3' HD60 to HD60 that barely reaches what I need it to do. I've dedicated four rack units per router and switch-set combo. Admittedly I've attempted to build a lab that will get me through CCNP in addition to CCNA, but I found the cost difference between the 1' and 2' to be negligible.

clarson's advice for WICs with 8P8C jacks pinned for RJ-48C is good, for short lengths as crossover cables you can just use Cat5 cable, and in reality probably even Cat3 or Bell wire would be adequate if you have any laying around.

I got bit by the wrong-version-card issue, tried to use some really cheap non-v2 cards in my 2811 and it didn't much care for it before I knew that they were incompatible.

ebohlman

clarson wrote: »

I take your looking a cables for serial wics for a home ccna lab. which the cable I pointed out above would be good.
another option is to buy serial wics that use a rj-45 connector (and make you own cables if you have a crimping tool. Those are even cheaper.
they would be the wic-1dsu-1t for 2600xm routers and wic-1dsu-1t v2 for 1800/2800 routers

Also don't forget the VWIC-2MFT-T1 which has two RJ45 T1 interfaces. They'll work in both series of routers, as well as 1721s/1760s (though I think the 1700s only support two T1s total, so you can't use two of the MFTs in them).

Configuring them is slightly (but just slightly) more involved than configuring a single-port card. They can be obtained fairly cheaply.