I’m building a lab at the house to use to study for CCNA and CCNP certification. On the left are some old Cisco routers and switches scrounged from work. On the right are some routers and switches I bought on eBay. I have a Cisco 3620 with an Async cable connected to all of the console ports so I can access all of the systems console ports thought the 3620.

It’s just about ready to go — I’m just waiting for an order of DCE/DTE crossover cables to arrive and then I’m in business. I hope to be able to get things set up so that I can administratively reconfigure the systems without having to make a lot of patch cable changes to create different scenarios… we’ll see.

Finally, in the bottom left corner, is an Ubuntu Linux system I’m using for general management of the switches. It’s got tftpd set up, and can receive syslog messages from the systems if I need to do some heavyweight log troubleshooting. Eventually, I hope to get it set up as a TACACS server as well.

Update #1 — mounted the equipment into a rack that was donated to this cause.