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.

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Short-Term Memory Loss

When I started preparing for the CCIE lab, I made a decision to build my own physical hardware lab at home.  Partly because I’m a geek and that’s the sort of thing we do, and partly because it made my life easier.  The ability to decide on the spur of the moment to fire up the rack and do an hour or two of labbing was very attractive to me, especially as most of the lab rental providers are US-based and work on 8 hour slots – this doesn’t always translate to friendly labbing hours here in the UK.

My lab is based loosely on the IPexpert topology – but built mostly using 1841s.  After a successful evening of labbing I’d shut down the rack and gone to bed.  The next day I’d fired it up again only to be caught by several of the 1841s getting stuck in a loop of stack traces and reboots.  The main error of any use was:

SYSTEM INIT: INSUFFICIENT MEMORY TO BOOT THE IMAGE!

Houston, we have a problem…

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Testing Multicast

As it’s been a couple of years since I last had to configure multicast, I decided to give it a quick spin in the lab this evening.  There’s plenty of other sites and resources out there for configuring PIM-SM, either with static RP (Rendezvous Point) or by using Auto-RP (proprietary) or Bootstrap Router (BSR – standards-based), so I’m not going to cover that ground here – see the references at the end of this post.

Instead, I want to focus on tools you can use to test multicast from host-to-host via your lab network.  Yes you can use the old standby of:

R5(config-if)#ip igmp join-group 239.1.1.1

and then ping the multicast group address from another router – but where’s the fun in that?  Fortunately there’s some good tools out there you can use to good effect for testing this kind of thing – and there’s two in particular that I’ve been using today – emcast and mnc.

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Home Lab: DIY 19″ Rack

This will hopefully be the first of a series of blog entries on setting up a home lab for CCNP study.  I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to cover in each post, but bear with me and we’ll see where this goes!

As part of my studying I decided it was high time I got myself some Cisco gear of my own.  While you can gain a lot of experience from the workplace there are obvious limitations – you simply can’t just start playing with things!  Also, unless you work for a consultancy or the very largest organisations it’s highly unlikely that you will use every single CCNP-level technology in your everyday job.  Companies that use OSPF might not necessarily use EIGRP, or companies will use MPLS for WAN connectivity over Frame Relay for example.  Equally not all organisations will be totally Cisco shops – Check Point or Netscreen might be used for firewalls/VPNs and F5 or Barracuda might be used for Network Load Balancing.  There’s simply too many variables to be able to cover the whole CCNP syllabus on kit in the office.

I’ll go over the kit that I bought at a later date, but tonight I wanted to pay some attention to housing all the kit that might make up a lab.  Unless you’re single or have a dedicated workroom it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get away with leaving your kit piled in a heap on the dining room table.  That might work until someone finds an DB60 DCE/DTE cable in their soup, but trust me, it’ll be downhill from there!

So the problem here is to come up with something that doesn’t look too awful and yet can hold a decent amount of kit and doesn’t cost the earth.  While there are ready-made racks on eBay and other sites, they all tend to be a little too big/imposing or expensive.  Not good.  So it was with some amusement that I came across the concept of the Rast Rack!  Put simply this is a Ikea bedside cabinet (nightstand for our .us friends) that happens to be more-or-less the right width for 19″ gear and vertical rack rails so the kit can be properly mounted.

I picked up a couple in Ikea over the weekend and together with some 6U rack rails bought from a music/stage supply store online, put together a rack in about 30 minutes or so this evening.

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On the whole I’m pretty pleased with it.  There’s only one problem I have with it – it could do with being a few mm wider as it’s a real squeeze getting kit in there with rack ears on.  However that could just be down to my dodgy aftermarket rack ears!  This does mean that taking stuff out will require slackening the bolts that hold it together, but that’s no real hardship.

Also, let’s do the math as to how much this cost: £7.99 for the Rast cabinet itself, £6.00 for the rack rails and maybe £5.00 for a lot of 50 cage nuts, washers and M6 machine screws.  I already had the screws that I used to fit the rack rails.

Grand total: £18.99.  If I make two of them that’s £32.98 (I don’t need more screws/nuts etc).  Still a good saving over £50.00 for a large metal monstrosity that’ll loom in the corner of the room…