Preparing for Cisco certification exam and need real equipment required to accomplish all those CCNA or CCNP labs? That’s not a problem any more. This is due to availability of Packet Tracer for Linux and Community Lab hosted by people behind packetlife.net. As for Packet Tracer it supports Linux natively now — Cisco offers it as deb package for Ubuntu or Debian and there is no need to use Wine to get Packet Tracer working in Linux. Try searching the web for “packet tracer deb” and I am sure you’ll find where to download desired file shortly (we do not share pirated content here).
Anyways sometimes Packet Tracer as like as dynamips/gns3 are not a panacea when it’s necessary to emulate mid-sized network or test some specific ios features on real Cisco devices. There are several options: the first and the easiest one means to buy Cisco device. But we all know that Cisco’s pricing policy is far away from democratic in application to individual users so even used or refurbished Cisco router/switch will cost enough to think about another option. Second option is to schedule access to Community Lab at packetlife.net. Nice to know the access to it is absolutely free so anyone can get logon to Cisco routers, switches or ASAs once user reached his/her timeslot. Here is the list of hardware you can have access to (there are multiple devices of the same model):
Cisco ASA 5505
Cisco 2811 (2xWIC-2T)
Cisco 1841 (1xWIC-2T)
Cisco Catalyst 3550-24
Not bad for free lab as for me. The lab is broken into two blocks so user can reserve only one block or both blocks simultaneously. This is to make it possible to access the lab by multiple users simultaneously. Devices are connected to each other according to predefined topology — see separate diagrams for Ethernet and Serial connections below (they are split to prevent overhead on the graph I guess). All documentation as well as FAQs can be found here: here and here. Thanks to Jeremy Stretch.


P.S. By the way if you can share any other similar labs allowing people on the web to access Cisco (or some other networking devices) — you are welcome to share this information here. Thanks!
Ho-ho-ho, see below a set of Sexy Christmas Wallpapers…
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Below is the link list to essential Cisco related cheat sheets (collection of notes or quick reference guides whatever). By the way, we don’t recommend to cheat anything and/or do a cheating of any sort by means of using these materials
1. Cisco IOS Versions what’s this?)
2. Physical Terminations/Connectors (what’s this?)
3. VLANs (what’s this?)
4. Quality of Service (what’s this?)
5. MPLS (what’s this?)
6. IP Access Lists what’s this?)
7. Spanning Tree (what’s this?)
8. OSPF (what’s this?)
9. EIGRP (what’s this?)
10. BGP (what’s this?)
11. General Cisco IOS cheat sheet (router/switch commands etc.)
12. Cisco Commands for Beginners
13. Descriptive list of Cisco Commands (fresh)
14. Cisco IOS Firewall Cheat Sheet (Official Design Guide)
15. Cisco – Ethernet Encapsulation (in pdf)
16. Mini CCNA Cheat Sheet
17. CCNA Cheat Sheet (commands debugging)
18. Connector Pinouts Cheat Sheets
Great thanks to Jeremy Stretch (author of packetlife.net) for the first 10 cheat sheets from above list (to get them all just download this package).
Below are the links which caught my eye this week, I hope that some of them will be useful and interesting for you…
- Canonical Store is to sell multimedia codecs for Ubuntu. Codecs are developed by Fluendo and Cyberlink. It is still possible to do
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras and get that staff installed…
- In A comparative look at compact sysadmin distributions article Cory Buford shares the observations he got during review of several portable (not more 210 Mb) Linux distros which may be helpful to handle “minor catastrophes”. BTW I prefer RIPLinuX
- T-Mobile, Google and HTC announce that first phone based on Android platform will be out next week (23th of September 2008).
- Google is going to launch its own “computer navy” (sea floating data centres). Now jokes – rumors.
- Codeweavers company has adapted Google Chrome browser for Linux and Mac platform.
- Mozilla asks to display firefox EULA in Ubuntu 8.10. Some people are really disturbed about that.
- XFCE 4.6 first alpha is out for public testing.
And we just launched Linux and Open Source News aggregator at Linux Screw, so you are welcome to set it your homepage
Well, Google is considering to deploy data centres necessary to operate their search engine on barges powering and cooling computers…
Sounds strangely? Just read below!
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