Rack Session Maximization

LearnAsIGo

Greetings All,

Decided to post in this forum believing most of you book rack rental sessions more often than the other cisco forums on here.

I'm a little bit of a rack rental newbie, so I decided to see how the “senior class” does it.

What do you do when you're well into a 6 hour session, then get STUMPED on how to configure something to make the lab work? Time is ticking by and you're just staring at the monitor while nervously watching your hard-earned money float away.

It happened to me today. Long story short, I couldn't get a hold of my stress level, which only made it worse. Before I knew it, I've got a dining table full of open cisco books, a screen full of tabs in firefox, and a clock that just keeps smiling.

Before a lab, I like to review what I'm going to do, or ATTEMPT to do. Then I try to game it out in my mind and look for potential pitfalls.

In case people were wondering, I was attempting route filtering/summarization for OSPF.

Any advice on minimizing this phenomena? Or is it just me?

Much thanks in advance.

mikej412

LearnAsIGo wrote:

Time is ticking by and you're just staring at the monitor while nervously watching your hard-earned money float away.

You remember that you are still spending less money than someone who built a home lab. And you think about that pay raise you'll get at your current job or that starting salery at your new job once you get your number .

For Rack rental, unless you are doing an 8 hour workbook lab -- have a backup plan for if you hit a snag. Save your configs and move on to another "technology lab" or topic. Do your reasearch and checking offline and try it again next rack session.

And if you are doing a workbook lab, move on to some other part -- its good practice for if you get a "brain cramp" in the real lab.

It is good to have some hardware at home to check out the technologies... but Dynamips and Dynagen is now a good option also.