CCNP home lab serial connections: T1 is the way to go!

As I'm building my home lab for the ROUTE exam, I find the DB60 DTE-DCE cables increasingly problematic, because:

• they cost money,
• they are bulky,
• they are as flexible as a flagpole.

After playing around with different back-to-back connections, eBay provided the ultimate solution: WIC-1DSU-T1 cards.

They are cheaper than WIC-1T and WIC-2T cards, and use regular UTP cables (not with ethernet pinout, mind you!) for connection. Everything I need for a neat, organized rack. Only downside: they need modular routers, and can't be used with the built-in interfaces of my 1005, 1605R and 2500 series boxes.

The command to remember:

service-module t1 clock source {line | internal}

Default is line, so set one end of the link to internal.

Foundry/Brocade console cable

A few months ago I managed to buy a Foundry FWS24 switch. It comes with a DB9 serial port, but it does not work with a standard rollover DB9-RJ45 cable + RJ45-DB9 adapter combo.

Turns out it needs a straight serial cable instead of a rollover, but the built-in DB9 port is male, and I don't have female-female straight cables on hand.

At first I did an ugly hack with a DB9-DB25 modem cable, but I didn't like it very much, so I sacrificed one of my baby-blue Cisco cables, cut off the RJ45 plug on the end, and crimped a new one upside-down on it (black wire to pin 8), making it a straight cable. Using that cable and a standard Cisco DB9-RJ45 adapter (74-0495-01), the Foundry box works like a charm.

Linux bridge STP long path cost (802.1t-2001)

A few years ago, we had to implement STP on Linux boxes, using the long path cost standard. If changing the cost values from userspace is not really your thing, here's a patched br_if.c source (mind you, it's for an old kernel version, probably 2.6.17 or something).

Edit: for those who are interested in the actual numbers, not the Linux code:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanning_tree_protocol#Data_rate_and_STP_path_cost

Cisco 2500 frame relay switch - for the CCNP

Top fun for the weekend -if you don't have a life- : build a frame relay network in your Cisco home lab!

As it turns out, the Cisco 2500 series can do frame relay switching, and has more than one serial interface, so it actually makes sense to do such thing.

You can find a config here, and a discussion here.

HP AIS - Network Infrastructure [2011]

It appears that HP joined the fast-track certification solution club after Juniper and Brocade:

you can get a HP AIS certification with a valid CCNA and a web-based exam.

So while the ASE - Campus LAN cert is getting phased out, Cisco and H3C folks can get some new types of ASE and MASE certifications.

On a related note, I think the HP networking exams got quite a bit harder, with the 3Com/H3C acquisition: now you have to know both the old HP network OS, and the Comware OS, and now we have some decent routers in the portfolio, not just the good old 7000dl series.