Lab issues

Does anybody spend more time screwing around with their at home lab then actually practicing labs on it?

Granted once things are up and running everything goes fairly smooth but I just spent 4 hrs setting up my lab for the JNCIE-M... There's not that much of a difference between the JNCIP-M and the JNCIE-M lab topology, just had to move a few cables, but as I was doing this I lost two routers.

The first one came up and passed traffic, but I could not reverse telnet or telnet into it from another router, very odd behavior, but I didn't mind this all to much, this router was sloow and so I was ok to replace it. And then the router next to it automatically reboots and then goes into a boot loop. I messed around with it for a bit, and gave up, replaced the HDD. At that point everything came up fine, untill I entered an exsisting config, then back to the boot loops...

Found out that it was a problem with the second interface and it couldn't process any multicast packets and when I changed the interface configuration I'm finally back to good, was able to put the old HDD back too.

I was looking forward to a good day of practicing labs but it ended up being a day of lab work instead, frustrating!

Anybody else run into issues like this when working with home labs?

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Comments

scheistermeister

Only when I make a stupid mistake working with my Cisco gear. Never had a problem that wasn't because I had missed something.

But I am curious as to what it takes to build a Juniper lab as I would love to learn about those too.

Ahriakin

Sometimes it happens that way, you've just got to look at it as good troubleshooting experience though, being in an environment that doesn't work necessarily as it's supposed to adds a more real world element to it... even if it does get a bit frustrating when you have a lot to do

tiersten

Ahriakin wrote:

Sometimes it happens that way, you've just got to look at it as good troubleshooting experience though, being in an environment that doesn't work necessarily as it's supposed to adds a more real world element to it... even if it does get a bit frustrating when you have a lot to do

What Ahriakin said. Look at it as good experience. If it happens again in the future then you'll know what to check. Reading a book won't give you everything. Its by playing around with real gear that you get to find out the little things.

dynamik

I bet you'll be able to remedy that situation immediately if it ever happens again

Aldur

Without a doubt if I see that problem again I'll know exactly what to do to fix it and the real world troubleshooting is what its all about, you don't get that with a sim

Building a juniper lab isn't too bad, mine's all out of olives, I can't justify coughing up the cash for a real m, or j series router. But as long as you get a old computer that'll work, get some hard to find compatible NIC's, and have a jinstall file handy, your good to go

In the end I went through about 20 computers that didn't work getting my lab of 17 olives together, granted I don't use them all at once, between 9 and 13, but the extras make good backups when I have a hardware failure.