Labbing in iTerm

In case you’ve not worked it out yet, I’m an enthusiastic Mac user.  I’ve used them on and off since I met my wife (a long-time and even more passionate Mac user) back in 2000 when she was running OS 9 on a Graphite iMac.  Despite negative initial impressions (“Ugh! Macs?”), she didn’t kick me out of her house and we got married 2 years later.

But I digress…  I’m running OS X Lion on a Macbook Air now and it’s easily my favourite computing environment.  I’ve also recently added an external screen (a Dell 22″ U2212HM) to try and prevent neckache from working on the laptop all the while.  I’m also trying (insofar as I can on the Mac) to replicate the CCIE lab environment.  From what I’ve seen on the web this roughly means:

• No tabbed terminals.
• Single 23″ display only.
• Work with electronic documentation, not hard copy.

First off I have one desktop that I use entirely for labbing.  In that I have all the terminal windows for my lab kit, the PDF of the IPexpert training materials that I’m using, a copy of MacVim (at some point I should probably start to use something more Notepad-like) and a calculator.  This pretty much mimics the software you have access to in the lab.  I also have a Chrome window open that has a bookmark that links to the DocCD.

I use iTerm2 as my terminal app of choice and it has a couple of options that make life a little bit easier when setting up a lab session.  The first of these is the Profiles menu.  I have a profile for each device – each profile being identical other than the “Command” setting.  I happen to use a shell script that runs telnet with the appropriate port numbers, but there’s nothing to stop you just setting the “Command” setting to /usr/bin/telnet <ip> <port>.

Once you have a whole bunch of profiles set up I select them all in the “Profiles” window and click the “New Window” button.  It’s then time to arrange the windows as you best see fit.

At this point, useful feature two comes in – and this is the “Save Window Arrangement” and “Restore Window Arrangement” options on the “Window” menu.  Choose the save option, give it a name and you will then find that your window arrangement has been saved for posterity.

Now when I start a lab session all I have to do is fire up the kit, give it a few minutes for the terminal server to boot and then restore the “Lab1″ window arrangement.  12 windows pop up in exactly the right place, with the right session open.  I can then either start to load on initial configs or carry on where I left off.  It makes the process of getting a lab session going that little bit easier – and with everything the lab throws at candidates we need ever bit of help we can get in preparing for it!