Emulating Cisco Routers.

For many people, the biggest challenge in learning Cisco when you don't work with it on a daily basis or have access to often quite expensive hardware, is practising your new found skills and cementing them in your brain.

For the CCNA in many respects it's not too bad as a 1600/1700 series router will cover a lot and shouldnt' be too hard to come by and basic 2924 12 ports aren't too expensive if you can find them but higher up the chain, like the BSCI and BCMSN (for the more advance spanning demo's) and to an extent just general pottering you need a lot of kit.

Fortunately, help is at hand!

I'm a big supporter of the GNS3 toolset. There are a number of tools out there but I often fall back to this one. It works on Windows and Linux (i've not investigated the Mac side of things) and it allows you to build networks in a Visio-esque environment, then configure the devices as if they were live routers.

Even better you can add it to a PC's NIC and connect it to physical networks, effectively extending any phsyical labs you may have.

The software can be found at http://www.gns3.net/ but please note it does require access to the full Cisco IOS file you plan to use per device.

For those of us fortunate enough to work for an ISP this is not tricky, for others you may have to "shop around" on the internet and look in some of the usual places , which naturally none of us condone but know are there.

I'll run some more posts around using it at a later date!