Simple question on Hosts connected to a switch/router?

Beany

Morning,

what do you do to test a dummy host connected to a switch or a router?

So for example, a home lab set up, how would i connect several hosts to a switch for testing without physically attaching the PCs in? I wouldnt have the space/money for physical connections! do you use loopback addresses?
ta

DCD

I'm not sure if you want to see the interface up or trying to do more than that. You can use no keep alive command or set every port on the switch to a different vlan and connect them.

JeanM

Well, you could use a laptop/netbook, or even another cheap router/switch or whatnot.

Another way is to do it in Packet Tracer or gns3 OR run virtual machines/pc's and add multiple network interface cards to your pc for the virtual pc's to use....

earweed

I have a couple quad nics on my server at home and run cables to the switch and run VMs connected to those NICs so that it resembles several actual hosts. I don't know that just connecting to the switches set to different VLANs would work as you are going to be testing things only a host would do.

Futura

you can create a loopback adapter like so

https://scottlinux.com/2011/08/03/how-to-create-ethernet-rj45-loopback-adapter/

not sure if this is waht your looking for, but usefull anyways

earweed

Futura wrote: »

you can create a loopback adapter like so

https://scottlinux.com/2011/08/03/how-to-create-ethernet-rj45-loopback-adapter/

not sure if this is waht your looking for, but usefull anyways

I think for what the OP seems to need you have to be able to ping the host along with some other stuff for labs like the switch putting the MAC address into the MAC address table.

DCD

With a Loopback address basically all you can do with it is ping it. So it hard to figure out what he what's to do. By the way with a real lab I got the vlan to work.