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 SNMPv2c on a router with a read-only community string, verifies a management station can successfully poll device information, and covers why SNMPv3 is preferred for production environments requiring authentication and encryption.
This hands-on lab backs up a router's running configuration to a TFTP server, deliberately makes an unwanted configuration change, and restores the router to its previous known-good state from the backup.
This hands-on lab copies a new IOS image to a router's flash memory from a TFTP server, verifies sufficient flash space before starting, and points the boot system variable at the new image to make it load on next reload.
This hands-on lab performs password recovery on a router with a lost or unknown enable secret, using ROMMON mode to bypass the startup configuration temporarily, reset the password, and restore normal operation with the original configuration intact.
This hands-on lab explores the Cisco IOS File System commands used to navigate, list, and manage files across a router's different storage locations, including flash, NVRAM, and remote file systems referenced by URL-style prefixes.
This hands-on lab configures SSH for secure remote management on a router, generating an RSA key pair, requiring local authentication, and restricting VTY lines to SSH only, verifying Telnet access is completely disabled.
This hands-on lab configures the AAA framework on a router using the local username database, creating a custom authentication method list and applying it to the VTY lines, demonstrating a more flexible and scalable authentication approach than the login local command alone.
This hands-on lab configures AAA authentication against an external RADIUS server, defines a method list that tries RADIUS first with local authentication as a fallback, and verifies the fallback activates correctly when the RADIUS server becomes unreachable.
This hands-on lab configures DHCP snooping to establish trusted and untrusted ports, then enables Dynamic ARP Inspection using the resulting binding table, demonstrating how the two features work together to block a simulated rogue DHCP server and ARP spoofing attempt.
This hands-on lab configures a local SPAN session that mirrors traffic from a specific switch port to a monitoring port, allowing a packet capture tool to inspect traffic without being directly inline with it.
This hands-on lab enables NetFlow on a router interface to collect traffic flow statistics, exports the data to a collector, and verifies flow records accurately reflect actual traffic passing through the monitored interface.
This hands-on lab configures an IPv6 ACL to permit only specific traffic between two networks, applying it to an interface and verifying both permitted and denied IPv6 traffic behave as expected.
