Infrastructure, Systems, and Connectivity
This hands-on lab assigns Scalable Group Tags to endpoints via 802.1X authorization, configures an SGT-based access policy independent of IP addressing, and verifies traffic is permitted or denied based purely on group membership rather than subnet or VLAN.
This hands-on lab configures PIM Sparse Mode across three routers with a designated Rendezvous Point, verifying a multicast receiver joins the shared tree and traffic from a source reaches the receiver through RP-based forwarding.
This hands-on lab observes a receiver's last-hop router automatically switch from the shared RP-rooted tree to a direct shortest-path tree toward the source once traffic volume crosses the default threshold, verifying both tree types appear in the multicast routing table at different stages.
This hands-on lab configures PIM in an HSRP environment, verifying that multicast forwarding correctly follows the active HSRP router rather than being split unpredictably between both routers in the redundancy pair.
This hands-on lab configures IS-IS between three routers using a single-area Level 2 design, verifying adjacencies form, routes are exchanged, and comparing IS-IS's NET addressing and terminology against the OSPF configuration approach covered earlier in this series.
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.
