Online labs at Cisco
Just finished an online lab through Cisco's Learning Connection called "Advanced BGP Design with BGP Community Attribute - Challenge Lab - LabOps - IP - Accelerate (SE)"
The CLC has a lot of labs, I look forward to doing more
Start here: http://forums.cisco.com/eforum/servlet/PrepCenter?page=BigSnippet.PrepCenter.PrepCenter_freeTrial_learning_connection
In this lab the object was to learn communities and route-maps. Basically you are an ISP with a customer and upstream peers. The customers set some communities on the routes, and your job is to effect the desired behaviour across the network. For example, any route tagged with 1:80 was supposed to set localpref to 80 within your network and prepend 3 times to the upstream peers.
I was happy that I was able to do this lab without any help, though I'll admit I didn't score 100% the first crack at it. I blame this on not seeing the final task :)
The layout of the lab is very good. You are given a web page with various tabs such as a map of the network, and your task list. Click on the router opens up a telnet window to the real router. You then click on an "evaluate" button to grade you, and it gives a very good report, giving you hints where to fix the problems.
The only thing I didn't like was the task list. Rather than giving me a list of tasks, it presented a long essay going through each task one by one, followed by some help. I would have preferred a summary of everything, followed by the breakdown.
Given that it's all free, I highly recommend checking these labs out!
Posted by Sean at September 2, 2005 09:22 AM | TrackBack