Recommendation on equipment

Well if you have a decent pc with gig or so of memory then use dynagen/dnynamips for your routers.

1900 switches are pretty old, you can find 2950's or 3500's on ebay fairly cheap.

Hi John,

You may wish to investigate Cisco eBay:

Sincerely,

Brad Reese

2007 Cisco Salary Rates

(...)

Pretty old hardware. Everything depends on what do you want to learn. There are people who passed CCNA and even didn't touched real Cisco hardware (only simulators like Boson Netsim and books) but it isn't good way. IMHO if you want pass CCNA and get some real experience you should consider buying routers like 26xx (ie 2610 + wic-1t/wic-2t modules and optional second ethernet port module) - there you can put 16M flash and

64RAM + ios 12.3. Good choice will be also 17xx routers (1720 / 1721 ) - quite new* hardware (by default? I'm not sure...) with serial and isdn ports modules. What about switches... 19xx - forget about it, most of them have catos (menu based software) instead of IOS, besides you will need at least 3 switches if you want to test (R)STP. Take a look at 29xx switches family...

Next thing... I don't remember exact model but AFAIR ones of 25xx routers had 4 serials ports - you may want to buy it and use as frame relay switch.

2507 has 16 ethernet ports - good stuff to test nat/access lists/simple QOS ... of course you can do it also on 2610 but it has one eth port so you will have to do 'router on the stick' or buy ethernet port module (ok, there is also another possibility - connect 2 routers via serial ports, wan to rtr1 eth, pc to rtr2 eth...).

Think about it and make your own decision. Remember one thing (this is only my opinion and I might be wrong) - if you don't have a couple of thousand $ to spend on your lab then you will never test everything (for example - isdn simulator - quite expensive stuff or many routers to test OSPF)

*quite new while you are looking at 25xx routers of course.

ps. sorry for my bad English if there are some mistakes...

Hi John

I have a 2514, ideal because it has 2 x serial interfaces so it can be a frame relay switch, and 2 x ethernet ports. A 1721 with 1 x serial and 1 x ethernet. A 1603 also with one of each. And I have a 2950 switch As for ISDN stuff, I do not have a simulator, too expensive, I just buy some rack time with

quite cheap and works very well. You could probably pick all this or similar up on Ebay for less than your

375 bucks, and it's better kit.

Good luck mate

Thanks everyone for such detailed advice. I have been given a bunch of info to digest.

Thanks,

John

Den wrote: