From the course: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) v1.1 (200-301) Cert Prep

Performing lab exercises

From the course: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) v1.1 (200-301) Cert Prep

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Performing lab exercises

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(bright music) - [Instructor] Let's consider some options for getting hands-on experience with the content that we're going to be going through. One option is to buy your own home lab from various online auction sites. You might want to go out and purchase some used Cisco gear. And even though the models might vary a little bit, personally, I would go after three routers in the 2,900 series, maybe three of the 2911 routers, and I would also probably get three of the Cisco Catalyst 3560 series switches. And with three routers and three switches, you can replicate a lot of the content that we're going to be going through. Another option is to use a network simulator, and many people are huge fans of Cisco's free software called Cisco Packet Tracer. It is a Cisco iOS simulator, meaning it's simulating being inside of these environments, but it's not running actual Cisco iOS. But with very few exceptions, it really seems like we're in real Cisco iOS and we can do a lot with Cisco Packet Tracer. And the way you get your free copy of Cisco Packet Tracer is you enroll in a class, it's called Getting Started with Cisco Packet Tracer. That's available at these Skills for All site. And I've given you a link on screen where you can get started with that. And you might want to go through that course on getting started with a Cisco Packet Tracer. As part of that course, you can download the software, but it's a great course that shows you the many, many things you can do with a Cisco Packet Tracer. Another option, and the one I use most often and what I recommend for CC and P candidates is to use a network emulator and I use Cisco Modeling Labs. And at the time of this recording, you pay $199 to get a year's access to CML Cisco Modeling Labs personal edition, and that's going to get you 20 nodes. And I'm showing you a couple of links on screen where you can go out and purchase CML and get a quick start guide. And if you decide to go with either Cisco Packet Tracer or Cisco Modeling Labs, there are lots of videos out on YouTube that can walk you through the installation and the basic configuration. But once you have your platform on which you're going to be doing these labs, let me show you what this course offers. We have a collection of lab PDF documents. They're in a zip file, which is inside of the downloadable exercises file zip file that we discussed in the previous video. Here's a PDF for our OSPF lab, and you'll see that it has a topology and it shows the interfaces. So if you're constructing this on your own, you can use this as your guide. And if you're using your own physical gear, some of the interface numbers might vary, so you would want to update those in the base configuration. But we do have a base configuration that in many cases you'll be able to copy and paste from the PDF document into your topology. You're going to be given the lab instructions, all the tasks that you're challenged with, and then after you try it on your own, we give you a complete step by step walkthrough solution. Now let me show you how easy it is to take the base configuration in this PDF and apply it in both a Cisco Packet Tracer and a Cisco Modeling Labs environment. Here on the right side of the screen, you can see our topology and using this topology, I have constructed an identical topology by dragging and dropping inside of a Cisco Modeling Labs. And here is my base configuration for R1. Notice how easy this is. I'm going to select the R1 base config. I'll do a copy. I'll go to R1, open its console, and I'm going to paste in that configuration. So now it shows that I'm on router R1, I can do a show IP interface brief command. We see I've got IP address assignments, my interfaces are up. I hope you'll agree that was really easy. And we can do the same thing with a Cisco Packet Tracer. Here in Cisco Packet Tracer, I've created another topology to match the topology shown in the lab. And what I can do is go into the CLI of this router, and again, I can just paste in my configuration. I'll do a show IP interface brief command, and we can see that my IP addresses have been applied. And that's a look at how we can use these PDF lab documents to get hands on experience. Now, if you're ready, I'm ready. So let's jump into the actual content of the course in our next video.

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