Infrastructure, Systems, and Connectivity
This hands-on lab configures a router to stream interface statistics continuously to a collector using model-driven telemetry, contrasting this push-based approach against the pull-based polling every prior monitoring method in this series relied upon.
This hands-on lab configures a DHCP server to point a factory-default router toward a bootstrap configuration file, verifying the device automatically downloads and applies its full configuration on first boot without any manual CLI interaction.
This hands-on lab enables the Guestshell container on a router, installs a Python package inside it, and runs a simple script that reads live interface data from the IOS CLI, demonstrating on-box programmability distinct from the external NETCONF/RESTCONF automation covered in earlier labs.
This hands-on lab writes a simple Ansible playbook from a control node to configure a banner and verify connectivity across two routers simultaneously, contrasting agentless, SSH-based automation against the on-box Guestshell scripting covered in the previous lab.
This hands-on lab configures SNMPv3 with full authentication and encryption on a router, verifying successful polling using proper credentials and confirming an SNMPv2c-style plaintext community string no longer works at all, addressing the security gap identified in an earlier SNMP lab.
This hands-on lab configures a basic VXLAN tunnel between two switches using static head-end replication, extending a single Layer 2 VLAN across an IP-routed underlay network without requiring the VLAN to be trunked hop-by-hop.
This hands-on lab replaces the static head-end replication from the previous lab with a BGP EVPN control plane, allowing VTEPs to dynamically learn each other's MAC and IP information rather than relying on manually configured peer lists.
This hands-on lab configures Segment Routing over an OSPF-enabled network, assigning a global segment ID to each router's loopback and verifying traffic follows label-based forwarding without requiring LDP, contrasting SR against the traditional MPLS control plane.
This hands-on lab presents a complex failure spanning BGP path selection, a VXLAN VNI mismatch, and a QoS policy misapplication simultaneously, requiring the systematic layer-by-layer troubleshooting approach used throughout this series to isolate and resolve all three faults.
This hands-on lab configures a basic Cisco SD-WAN-style overlay using underlying IOS-XE SD-WAN CLI constructs, establishing control connections and a data plane tunnel between two edge routers, contrasting the centralized policy model against the manually configured DMVPN overlays covered earlier in this series.
This hands-on lab configures a centralized SD-WAN data policy identifying voice traffic and steering it onto a preferred low-latency transport path, demonstrating application-aware routing decisions made centrally rather than through per-device route-maps.
This hands-on lab configures a basic SD-Access-style fabric using LISP as the control plane and VXLAN as the data plane, registering an endpoint's location with a map server and verifying traffic between two fabric edge nodes is encapsulated using the endpoint's dynamically learned location.
