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 walks through assigning IPv4 addresses to router interfaces, verifying that addressing with essential show commands, and correcting a deliberately introduced configuration error. Students will practice the core interface configuration workflow every Cisco engineer uses daily.
This hands-on lab covers assigning global unicast IPv6 addresses to router interfaces, confirming the automatically generated link-local address, and verifying reachability between two routers using IPv6-specific commands.
This hands-on lab demonstrates how a router can automatically generate its own IPv6 global unicast address using stateless address autoconfiguration, based on a prefix advertised by a neighboring router, eliminating the need to manually type every address.
This hands-on lab demonstrates how a device resolves an IP address to a MAC address using ARP, and shows how Proxy ARP allows a router to answer ARP requests on behalf of a device on a different subnet, sometimes masking a missing default gateway configuration.
This hands-on lab covers connecting two routers directly via a serial cable without any intermediate WAN provider, correctly identifying and configuring the DCE and DTE ends, and verifying the resulting point-to-point link.
This hands-on lab confirms that Cisco HDLC is the default WAN encapsulation on serial interfaces, demonstrates what happens when the two ends of a link use mismatched encapsulation, and covers the verification commands used to diagnose this common WAN connectivity problem.
This hands-on lab covers replacing the default Cisco HDLC encapsulation with the open-standard PPP protocol on a serial link, verifying the LCP and NCP negotiation phases, and confirming the link functions correctly.
This hands-on lab configures PAP authentication on a PPP serial link, demonstrating the simple two-way username and password exchange PAP uses, and shows what happens when the configured credentials do not match between the two routers.
This hands-on lab configures CHAP authentication on a PPP serial link using matching local usernames on both routers, demonstrating CHAP's more secure challenge-response exchange compared to PAP and highlighting the critical requirement that both sides share an identical secret.
This hands-on lab configures CHAP authentication using the alternative ppp chap hostname and ppp chap password interface commands rather than matching local usernames, a method that scales far better when a single router has many WAN links to different peers.
This hands-on lab configures a basic eBGP peering session between two routers in different autonomous systems, advertises a network into BGP, and verifies the resulting route appears correctly in the neighboring router's routing table.
This hands-on lab configures a GRE tunnel between two routers across an intermediate transit network, allowing routing protocols and multicast traffic to pass between sites even when the underlying transport network would not normally support them directly.
