Friday, April 3, 2009

Dynamips with Switches

Since I am running a full scale dynamips lab, I decided to connect dynamics to real switches. I'll be using 4x3550, with 3x quad port NICs. I will do a couple rented rack sessions to familiarize myself with features specific to 3560.

Initially when I decided to go for quad port NICs after foraying through myriad forums, I realised most of the quad NICs were PCI cards. And this posed to be a huge problem because I only have two PCI slots on my motherboard. Dismayed that I would have to resort to changing the motherboard (recently bought...no way) or go with USB NICs, which would be a pain due driver compatiblity issues with linux, I decided to give it one final try. Fortunately, I have 3 PCI express slots and quick search revealed that Intel Pro/1000 PT Server adapter would be the best choice, expensive but worth it.

So at present I have ordered 2x Dlink DFE-580Tx and 1x Intel Pro/1000 PT Server adapter. Hopefully, it should arrive next week. Meanwhile, I spent most of yesterday, changing initial config files for backbone and nonbackbone routers for IE ver4.10 VOL2, VOL3 and IE ver5 VOL1 to be compatible with my setup of dynamips. I only have couple of changes, eg: R3,R4,R5,R6 use F0/0 and F2/0 instead of E0/0 and E0/1 and the routers will be connected to real switches. I also created 2 .net files for IE ver 4 vol 2 and vol 3 labs [ie.410.vol2.net , ie.410.vol3.net]. So when I am going to do for example, lab 2 from vol 2, I do and find a replace of "X", where X is the directory containing initial configs for routers, in the cnfg parameter of the ie.410.vol2.net file.
The good thing with real switches would be the capability to directly paste the switch configs I do the labs and do most of the switching sections.

I have two more labs in IE VOL1, bridging and switching and QoS. I found most VOL1 labs to alright, but then again I havent started full scale labs.

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