Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Test: Cabling Your Household Lab
Extra CCNA and CCNP candidates than at any time before are placing alongside one another their personal dwelling labs, and there’s no greater way to find out about Cisco systems than operating with the genuine matter. Receiving the routers and switches is just component of putting together a fantastic CCNA / CCNP household lab, however. You’ve got acquired to get the proper cables to join the units, and this is an critical part of your education as very well. Soon after all, with no the ideal cables, consumer networks are heading to have a hard time functioning!
For your Cisco house lab, one important cable is the DTE/DCE cable. These cables have two big takes advantage of in a home lab. To apply instantly connecting Cisco routers by means of Serial interfaces (an important CCNA skill), you can require to join them with a DTE/DCE cable. 2nd, if you plan on having a Cisco router act as a body relay switch in your lab, you’ll need to have several DTE/DCE cables to do so. (Check out my website’s House Lab Assist area for a sample Frame Relay change configuration.)
If you have a number of switches in your lab, that’s fantastic, mainly because you may be able to get a good deal of spanning tree protocol (STP) operate in as perfectly as developing Etherchannels. To hook up your switches, you’ll will need crossover cables.
You may want some straight-by cables as well to join your routers to the switches.
Lastly, if you’re blessed adequate to have an accessibility server as component of your lab, you can expect to require an octal cable to join your AS to the other routers and switches in your lab. The octal cable has 1 massive connector on just one stop and eight numbered RJ-45 connectors on the other conclusion. The large connector need to be connected to the async port on your AS, and the numbered RJ-45 connectors will be linked to the console ports on your other routers and switches.
Picking out and connecting the appropriate cables for your Cisco CCNA / CCNP residence lab is a good understanding practical experience, and it is also an crucial part of your Cisco training. Right after all, all terrific networks and residence labs all start out at Layer One particular of the OSI model!