5 comments on “In those days, you had to build a lab…

  1. Pingback: 10 years a CCIE | SubnetZero

  2. Wow!!! You just told my story! Haha. I remember using Win 2K servers as low cost OSPF peers to supplement my lab when I first started scrimping equipment together, and my coworkers laughing at my ghetto Win2K 1601 setup. Hey, the LSAs look the same in the debug, and that was all that mattered! I picked up an async EISA card and used that as a low cost terminal server until I could afford a used 2511. Haha. I eventually built a fairly capable lab, after thousands of dollars of investment. I was able to pick up some old fixed Fore Systems ATM switches and an actual Adtran ISDN switch (not a simulator) on eBay around 2000. When I finally took the lab in 2006, ISDN and ATM were gone, and VoIP dial peers had just been dropped, so I had what I considered to be a purist nirvana routing/switching lab.

  3. Oh yea, … I remember being so stoked when I discovered Dynamips!!! After going through the trials and tribulations of building a physical lab, I was an early champion of Dynamips, and eventually participated in the original GNS3 crowd funding … my name is in the code somewhere haha.

    • Oh yeah Dynamips. I had forgotten that name. I was already at Cisco when that came out so I was using IOU internally instead, which I thought was brilliant. On the routing protocols team at TAC, everyone was wasting time with physical recreates while I’d spin up a few IOUs for pure protocol issues. (And save the hardware for platform-specific stuff.) When I left and went to the partner I was relieved to have Dynamips since I lost access to IOU. Glad you enjoyed the story.

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