After the last post when I had built up and installed my new Dynamips server along with a set of Sun Quad NIC cards (501-4366, HME or Happy Meal as they are also known) I started to run into some issues.

After building a simple topology with one router connected to my 3550 I was seeing each device in the others CDP table which was good. It wasn’t until today when I was trying to lab something up where two routers connected via that external 3550 (using 2 ports on the quad NIC) would not form a neighbourship, everything was checked and sure enough they couldn’t even ping each other.

I checked the ARP table and there were entries and they were all correct and when I ran a set of debugs between the routers the packets were arriving however there was something wrong with the packets as the router was simply dropping them. Continue reading →

Back when I first starting studying for my CCNP I built a rack of equipment to lab things up and practice with (picture below) and after completing my CCNP and moving down the CCIE track (after stopping off for a pit-stop at the CCIP station….) I quickly realised that the rack wasn’t adequate for what I would be needing.

Old Rack

There were two options, spend a stupid amount of money and replace the lab with one equal to that of the INE/IPX racks (2811’s, 3745’s etc.) or just scrap most of the rack and go virtual (not to the cloud though…) with a Dynamips/Dynagen server, needless to say I went for the latter 😛

Last month I took the plunge and took a trip down to CCL to pick up the parts for the new server and got to work on sourcing some quad NIC’s

All I need now is to upgrade my L2 section of my rack and I will be ready to take on the INE/IPX labs (whichever I choose to go down), to do that I will need another 3550 and two 3560’s

I will post up some more snippets soon on my setup (and some new pictures to go with it!)