Got my new CCNA R&S home lab in place! A couple questions.

fmitawaps

After what I felt was some judicious shopping on ebay and cablesforless.com , I put together a CCNA home lab. Just got the final parts in today.

Here's what I have:

3 Cisco 2811 ISR routers, all 3 have IOS 15.1 (4)M9. All 3 have 1GB flash memory cards. 1 has 512 MB RAM and 2 have 256 MB. Paid $101 with shipping included.

3 Cisco 3560 24 port switches. All have IOS 12.2 (25)SEB4 and whatever the factory amount of RAM is. Paid $168 with shipping included.

At cablesforless, I got some nice purple 3 foot and 7 foot Ethernet cables, and on ebay, some green 3 foot crossover Ethernet cables. And a USB to Ethernet console cable, part # ftdi ft232rl. It has some sort of chip in it so the cable with USB end is all one piece, no separate adapter. After a few tries, I got my 7 Pro 64 bit laptop to download and install the correct driver for it, so it works.

Questions. I believe these routers and switches have their default settings in them now, how can I check that and revert them to default if they aren't already?

And, I'd like to keep the default settings saved in NVRAM. Since I will be doing many different configs on them, and will probably not save the configs, what's the best way to revert the routers and switches to default config when I'm done with something? I guess I could just restart / reload them, but that would mess up the uptime counter in show version, not that it is the end of the world. Is there a delete command I can use to delete whatever config I have put in, and the routers and switches come out at all stock settings?

Once I got the routers and switches here, I took the covers off each one to see what was inside, and give them all a thorough cleaning inside and out. I was surprised to see that the routers just use a stick of DDR1 PC2700 / PC2100 ECC ram, like in a server. I pulled the RAM sticks out and googled their part numbers. Since one has 512 MB and the other 2 have 256 MB, I don't think it'd help if I raised them all to 512MB, would it? I won't be doing any crazy CCIE level configs anytime soon.

alias454

What materials do you plan on using for your learning? How to wipe the config and reload should be located in the first chapter or two of most CCNA books I would think. To answer your question though.

You should be prompted to perform an express setup if the configs were erased prior to you getting the device. Just select no to skip the express setup.

To reset defaults:
write erase

You can check the switches for leftover vlan info
dir flash:

if you see a vlan.dat file you can remove it
delete flash:vlan.dat

reload

I'm not sure why uptime matters in a home lab so I will act like you didn't mention it. When you are working on something you might want to get in the habit of saving your work as you go wr or copy run start. It isn't like it takes that much effort to wipe out the configs and reload the device when you want to start fresh. As part of learning for the CCNA, pure outright repetition works. Doing the same basic configs over and over will burn it into your memory.

256MB of ram is going to be fine for your home lab. However, there is nothing stopping you from adding more if you can't help yourself Last I looked a stick of 512 was like 11 bucks or something like that. One thing that may be a good idea, is purchasing a console server. This will allow you to remotely access all of your devices over a network without your pc having to physically be next to them. Digi CM32 RJ45 32 Ports Serial Console Terminal Server 50000838 005 with Cable | eBay

You are going to have so much fun over the next few weeks; it's not even funny. I remember when my gear showed up, it was like Christmas. I still get a big grin when I look at all my old junk

Regards,

fmitawaps

I noticed the first differences today, between using Cisco Packet Tracer and real computers. Basic computer configurations. I set up a router and switch using a very basic lab configuration from my Udemy courses, but of course real laptops don't set up their ip and subnet mask the same way as in packet tracer. I tried setting static IPs for the laptops, and looking in command line / ipconfig to see what their addresses were, but even with 2 laptops hooked up to the same switch, in the same default vlan, they'd time out on ping attempts between them. I set one laptop as 192.168.0.1 in LAN settings, but in cmd / ipconfig, it would still show as 169.254.something.

I did notice that in the cmd window on the laptops, the subnet was coming out as 255.255.0.0 instead of the 255.255.255.0 that was on the switch, but even after resetting it on the switch, it still timed out.

This is a very basic setup that I've done in packet tracer, and it always worked fine.

Any ideas on what I need to be setting / looking for?

EDIT - I remembered. Instead of going into Internet Options / Connections / LAN Settings, I needed to be in TCP/IPv4 to manually input the ip, gateway, and subnet mask. Duh! I did this on laptops at work, I totally forgot it here.

And a further problem, even after all the setup, and doing a packet tracer copy of the network, it'd still time out. Turning off Windows Firewall on one computer allowed them both to ping each other, despite the fact that they had identical copies of 7 Pro 64 bit on each computer. Strange. I turned off the firewalls on both PCs to eliminate the problem.

v1ral

You have no idea how much the Windows firewall annoyed me when I was setting up my home lab. It took me 3 days to realize it was Windows that was blocking ping.