More CCNA and CCNP candidates than ever before are putting together their own home practice labs. It's more affordable than it ever has been, and I receive emails daily from new CCNAs and CCNPs who say it's the best thing they could have done to improve their studies.
Laptop Battery There are some commands you can configure on your lab routers that won't necessarily be on your CCNA or CCNP exams, but they will make life a lot easier for you. Let's take a look at just a few of these.
CCNA Virtual Lab, Titanium Edition ( 0470148942)-- on practice with routers and switches is critical for success on the CCNA exam, yet the costs associated with the required hardware are prohibitive. drop technology, the CCNA Virtual Lab, Titanium Edition allows users to create a simulated lab using an unlimited number of routers and switches. Users can then either follow the lab exercises provided or experiment with the hundreds of configuration commands built into the simulator. An extensive Help menu is available to guide users through complex tasks.
Thinkpad The command "no exec" is short, yet powerful. Occasionally you'll have what is referred to as a "rogue EXEC" process tie up a line, and you end up having to continually clear lines, which disrupts your practice. If you have an access server, I highly recommend you configure this command on your lines, as shown here:
Occasionally, during your CCNA and CCNP studies, you'll run into a term that just doesn't quite make sense to you. (Okay, more than occasionally!) One such term is "reverse telnet". As a Cisco certification candidate, you know that telnet is simply a protocol that allows you to remotely connect to a networking device such as a router or switch. But what is "reverse telnet", CCNP home lab setup
Microsoft ACCESS_SERVER(con)#line 1 8
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Laptop Computers ACCESS_SERVER(con)#no exec
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Laptop Computer From your CCNA studies, you know that the command "no ip domain-lookup" prevents a Cisco router from sending a broadcast to find a DNS server anytime you enter something that is not an IOS command - and that includes mistyped commands, which happens to all of us sooner or later. Make sure to run that command in global configuration mode on all your practice routers.
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Desktop Computer There are two commands I like to configure on the console line on all my practice routers and switches. The first is "exec-timeout 0 0", which prevents you from being kicked out of enable mode and back into user exec after a few minutes of inactivity. (This doesn't sound like much, but you'll get pretty tired of typing "enable" after a while.) The first zero refers to minutes, the second zero to seconds. Setting them both to zero disables the exec-timeout function.
Notebooks The second command prevents the router from interrupting the command you're typing with a console message. If you've ever been in the middle of typing a router command and suddenly you're interrupted with a logging message, you know that can be pretty annoying. We don't want the router to not display the message, but we do want the router to wait until we're done entering data. The command to perform this is "logging synchronous".
Lenovo R1(config)#line console 0
Hard Drive R1(config-line)#exec-timeout 0 0
Travelstar R1(config-line)#logging synchronous
Gateway You won't see many of these commands on your exams, but after you configure them on your home lab devices, you'll wonder how you did without them!
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Software Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage (http://www.thebryantadvantage.com), home of free CCNA and CCNP tutorials, The Ultimate CCNA Study Package, Ultimate CCNP Study Packages, and CCNA CBT video training. Pass the CCNA exam ,BSCI exam , and BCMSN exam with Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933!
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