Infrastructure, Systems, and Connectivity
This hands-on lab configures a routed EtherChannel between two Layer 3 switches, bundling two physical links into a single logical routed interface rather than a switched trunk, and verifies OSPF forms a single neighbor relationship across the bundle rather than one per physical link.
This hands-on lab configures VRF-Lite on a router to maintain two completely separate routing tables for two different customer networks sharing the same physical router, verifying each VRF's traffic remains isolated despite using overlapping IP address space.
This hands-on lab configures selective route leaking between two VRFs using route targets and a shared services VRF, allowing specific routes to cross the otherwise strict isolation boundary established in the previous VRF-Lite lab.
This hands-on lab configures Policy-Based Routing on a router to send traffic from a specific source subnet out a different path than the normal routing table would select, overriding the destination-based forwarding decision that every previous routing lab in this series relied on.
This hands-on lab configures eBGP between two routers in different autonomous systems with a full verification workflow, examining the BGP table, AS-path attribute, and confirming routes are correctly installed with eBGP's default administrative distance.
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.
