Lab, and network upgrade

Home lab · networking cisco homelab · 2021-03-12 · Daniel

I like networking -- always have. However, today, my networking knowledge is only okay -- but I want it to be great! My goal is to achieve CCNP certification in 6 months. To help with this effort, I have added a Cisco lab to my home network. It is old equipment (2x 2610, 1x 2611, 3x 2950) running IOS 11 and 12, but that's okay, and it will soon be upgraded: as I cut over to Ubiquiti equipment for my home network, the 2960s I am using today will move to the lab, and I will add a layer 3 switch as well. The lab routers will also be upgraded to something running IOS 15, but I'm not sure what yet.

I like network diagrams, so for fun, here is a diagram of my current home network:

Home network 2021

And here is my Cisco lab:

Cisco lab 2021-03

As you can probably imagine, I have been fun expanding my use of VLANs and BGP in my home network.

I have further plans as well:

  • Introduce a MySQL cluster. This will use an anycast address (see earlier post on anycast) so that clients can specify the anycast address and not care which server they talk to.
  • Introduce a router between my lab and my home network. Current plan is to use Cumulus VX for this, because I want to learn Cumulus Linux as well.
  • I want the lab completely separated from my home network; as you can see from the diagrams above, the lab is connected to my home network. This will change as I introduce Cumulus VX to the mix.

Planned network upgrades:

At that point, all of the switches and APs will be PoE, meaning I will have only a single place for battery backup of the entire network, and fewer wall warts.

Daniel's Blog

I am a system engineer in the Raleigh, NC area. My main interests are Unix, VMware, and networking. More about me, and how I got started.

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