CCENT lab built, what now???

Hey guys, Im studying for the CCENT exam and have built up my home lab, it consits of 2x 3560 switches, 2x routers(cant remember the model) and one terminal server. Im am progressing through the CCENT 101-105 press book and have just finished the chapter on troubleshooting ethernet lans and am just about to move on to subnetting. Whilst Ive been going through the chapters I have been applying the configurations I have been reading such as setting up SSH, Vlans, port security ect ect, how ever I feel I have hit a bit of a dead end. How do I actually set up my lab for troubleshooting scenarios? Is there any sort of blue prints I could use or someone could provide that I can set my lab up to replicate an actual enterprise setup? Any other infortmation on Lab setup for the CCENT would also help. Thanks Pujan

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v1ral

Start practicing setting up vlans and figure out a way o hook up your lab to your actual home internet. Look up configurations for the CCNA since they're far more abundant than CCENT.

WastedHat

I was wondering the same when I started using my physical lab but I got by just by making own scenarios from the offical cert guide. Are you using the same book?

Now that you know how to make working configurations you could try making configurations that don't work and use 'show' commands to see how it reflects in the output. Or in some cases IOS won't even accept the input. Heres a few examples that might help..

Put devices in different vlans without layer 3 capabilities and see how they can't ping each other, look at the show vlans to get used to seeing which ports are mapped to what vlans.

If you use Linux you can use a program called 'macchanger' to change your MAC address to cause port security violations and again see what happens in the output of the relevant show commands.

You can also do incomplete configurations leaving out 1 or more necessary commands, e.g. not generating crypto keys with SSH and see the behavour when you try to login.

It's just one way to do it, use your imagination to get a feel for all the different scenarios that you may come accross on a real switch and on the exam.

8thdegreepwnologist

Nice setup.

pinkiaiii

nice setup,its handy if your not working in real lab in college since theres so much you can come up with,and most of it if not all for ccent can be done in PT-not exactly sure how much ccent covers,but as suggested above you could try pluggin in laptop into secured port to see outcome and if it works as configured.
more advanced tasks guess that would be icdn2 try backing up flash into tftp server,or into memory stick and do full ios install,setup ether-chanell -do like one cable disconnection,or use faulty cable check crc frame errors,if channel still up,also handy if having lab setup NTP server for others to synchronize from,also good one to learn is how to reset config when forgotten password-the amount of times it happens in labs its really usefull step to learn how to bypass it and get switch into default config.
Also try floating route setup,if one route fails other should take over.

Now most of it is basics but getting this stuff ingrained in head and knowing how to solve it fast makes you more advanced thus if some stuff isnt part of your curillicum yet it will be handy just knowing it.And as suggested hook your lab to your home router and setup some server,that you could ssh into routers/switches and have access from outside,since it might not part of course but everything is connected at the end.

GDaines

pujan96 wrote: »

Hey guys, Im studying for the CCENT exam and have built up my home lab, it consits of 2x 3560 switches, 2x routers(cant remember the model) and one terminal server. Im am progressing through the CCENT 101-105 press book and have just finished the chapter on troubleshooting ethernet lans and am just about to move on to subnetting. Whilst Ive been going through the chapters I have been applying the configurations I have been reading such as setting up SSH, Vlans, port security ect ect, how ever I feel I have hit a bit of a dead end. How do I actually set up my lab for troubleshooting scenarios? Is there any sort of blue prints I could use or someone could provide that I can set my lab up to replicate an actual enterprise setup? Any other infortmation on Lab setup for the CCENT would also help. Thanks Pujan

Use this site to practice subnetting: subnettingquestions.com - Free Subnetting Questions and Answers Randomly Generated Online

As previously mentioned, connect one of the routers (lets call it R1) to your home router so it can access the internet. Configure it as an NTP time server and configure all your other devices to set their time using NTP from the router. You'll also need to set up PAT so that clients on your Cisco network can access the Internet.

I set up DHCP and VLANs on a layer3 switch which you can do too, or you can use ROAS (Router On A Stick) and just use layer2 functionality on the switches. Might be worth setting that up on the other router so one is the connection to the outside world while the other provides DHCP to your network. I used to recycle old computers in a previous job so I happen to have a load lying around which comes in really handy for testing inter-VLAN communication - put each computer on a different VLAN and make sure everyone can talk to everyone else. If you don't have physical computers and are running Windows 10 on a reasonable spec machine, you could set up some virtual machines, but to work properly you'll need a 4-port LAN card fitting so each system has it's own LAN connection. As a last resort if neither of those is possible you can use loopback addresses, but I don't think I've tried creating them on switches so don't know if it's possible.

Set up a TFTP server on your PC so you can backup and restore configs and IOS from/to all your devices.

Set up SSH on every device and configure them to refuse Telnet connections. Try to get four sessions running so you're connected to them all at the same time without using your access server (you can still configure the devices through the access server but you'll need to be able to set up and test SSH as in the real world devices are not usually located close enough to each other use an access server).

fmitawaps

You want to study for CCENT, and you don't even know what routers you have? And 3 3560 switches will be more useful than 2.