A Cisco Router Lab is a hands-on practice environment for learning, configuring, and troubleshooting Cisco networks from the foundational CCNA level all the way to the expert CCIE level.
This hands-on lab configures iBGP among three routers within a single autonomous system, demonstrating the full-mesh peering requirement by deliberately omitting one peering relationship and observing the resulting route propagation failure.
This hands-on lab configures a BGP route reflector to eliminate the full-mesh requirement demonstrated in the previous lab, allowing a hub router to redistribute iBGP-learned routes to its client peers without requiring a direct session between every pair of routers.
This hands-on lab configures BGP weight and local preference to manually influence outbound and inbound path selection respectively, demonstrating how each attribute overrides the default best-path decision at a different point in the network.
This hands-on lab configures AS-path prepending on one outbound BGP path to make it appear artificially longer to external peers, influencing an upstream AS's inbound path selection without that AS needing any configuration change of its own.
This hands-on lab configures the MED attribute on two eBGP paths advertised to the same neighboring AS, verifying it influences that neighbor's inbound path selection only when AS-path length and other higher-priority attributes are already equal.
This hands-on lab configures a BGP community value on a specific route and uses it downstream to apply a matching policy, demonstrating how communities let routers tag routes with metadata that any downstream router can act on without re-examining the original matching criteria.
This hands-on lab configures inbound and outbound prefix-list filters on a BGP session to control exactly which routes are accepted or advertised, verifying the filters block unwanted prefixes while permitting the intended ones through.
This hands-on lab configures BGP route summarization using the aggregate-address command, advertising a single summarized route for several specific subnets while comparing the summary-only and summary-plus-specifics behavior options.
This hands-on lab configures an eBGP session between two loopback addresses requiring multiple router hops, using ebgp-multihop to establish it, then adds MD5 authentication to secure the resulting session.
This hands-on lab configures Bidirectional Forwarding Detection between two routers and links it to OSPF, dramatically reducing failure detection time compared to relying on OSPF's own hello and dead timers alone.
This hands-on lab configures an IP SLA operation to actively measure round-trip time and jitter to a remote destination, scheduling it to run continuously and reviewing the collected performance statistics.
This hands-on lab configures a Cisco IOS Zone-Based Firewall between an inside and outside zone, defining a security policy permitting outbound-initiated traffic while blocking unsolicited inbound connections, and verifies stateful return traffic is handled automatically.
