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 extends the previous single-area IS-IS topology into a Level 1/Level 2 hierarchy, designating one router as an L1/L2 border, and verifying route leaking between levels mirrors OSPF's inter-area behavior covered earlier in this series.
This hands-on lab configures MD5 authentication on an IS-IS interface, verifying the adjacency requires a matching password and observing the resulting failure when passwords are mismatched, mirroring the OSPF and EIGRP authentication labs covered earlier in this series.
This hands-on lab configures two-way mutual redistribution between OSPF and EIGRP domains on a boundary router, verifying routes propagate correctly in both directions and demonstrating the seed metric requirement each protocol imposes on redistributed routes.
This hands-on lab extends the previous mutual redistribution topology to demonstrate a routing loop caused by redistributing routes back into their originating protocol, then resolves it using distribute lists and route tags.
This hands-on lab configures a router as a DHCPv6 server in both stateless mode (providing only DNS information alongside SLAAC) and stateful mode (assigning full addresses), verifying clients behave differently depending on the router advertisement flags set.
This hands-on lab configures a router to relay DHCPv6 requests from a remote subnet to a centralized DHCPv6 server, mirroring the ip helper-address behavior covered earlier in this series but using IPv6's distinct relay mechanism.
This hands-on lab configures stateful NAT64 on a router, allowing an IPv6-only client to reach an IPv4-only destination through automatic address translation, verifying the well-known NAT64 prefix correctly embeds the destination's IPv4 address.
This hands-on lab configures DNS64 synthesis on a router, automatically generating the synthesized IPv6 address a client needs to reach an IPv4-only destination without requiring the client to manually construct it, completing the transition mechanism started with NAT64 in the previous lab.
This hands-on lab configures RA Guard and DHCPv6 Guard on switch ports to block rogue router advertisements and rogue DHCPv6 server responses, extending the IPv4 DHCP Snooping and DAI concepts covered earlier in this series into the IPv6 first-hop security domain.
This hands-on lab configures both traffic shaping and traffic policing on separate interfaces, comparing how each mechanism handles traffic exceeding its configured rate — shaping by buffering and delaying, policing by dropping or remarking outright.
This hands-on lab configures Weighted Random Early Detection on an outbound interface, verifying it begins probabilistically dropping lower-priority traffic before the queue fills completely, contrasting this proactive approach against tail drop's simpler reactive behavior.
This hands-on lab configures CBWFQ with three traffic classes receiving guaranteed minimum bandwidth allocations, verifying each class receives at least its configured share during congestion while a class-default queue absorbs unclassified traffic.
