[CS-FSLUG] Building An Experimental LAN

[Tim Young]

Hi,
My first question is, "what sort of budget are you looking at?"

I have played with a ton of equipment, from routers and switches, to 
other networking things.  A lot depends on what is the purpose of 
your playing...

Routers/switches usually have multiple interfaces, web, GUI, and 
text.  The GUI depends on the vendor. Cisco, for example, has a Java 
based GUI that lets you do a lot of management things.

Most of the big vendors, have a very different command-line ruleset.  
If you get a Cisco, you will learn one set of commands, and if you 
get a netgear, you will have a totally different set of commands to 
learn.  They even use different terms to do the same concept.  So it 
can be difficult to jump between different vendors.

Managed switches and high-end routers are relatively expensive. 
Meaning, upwards of a thousand dollars for a current device.  The 
nice thing about much of the managed equipment, however, is that the 
concepts and commands used for the commandline are pretty close to 
the same as they were way back in the 10/100 days.  Soooo...  You can 
try getting some used 10/100 equipment and pay much less than if you 
bought something new.  You just do not get to walk away with having a 
rocking (and useless) 10-gigabit connection from your computer to 
your 3MB DSL connection to the Internet.

There are actually tons of networking concepts you can learn.  Do you 
have anything in particular you are hoping to play with?  Do you have 
a scale of a network you are wanting to simulate?  (Vlans, DMZ, 
multi-device control, etc)

On 12/7/2012 6:18 PM, Don Parris wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am toying with the idea of building a LAN with 2 subnets. I would 
> need two routers, a managed switch, and a WAP.  Part of the idea is 
> to use a subnetting scheme, but also to familiarize myself with 
> professional-grade routers/switches (i.e., managed switches) that 
> offer console/vty (ssh) access.
> I currently have an old Linksys WRT45G, but no N-band capability, 
> which I understand offers speed improvements, so that's an item 
> that needs to be retired/donated and replaced with a newer WAP that 
> plugs into a switch.  I also want all gigabit ethernet (probably 
> just go with 1000TX/CAT6 cables for the cabled boxes)
> I am thinking of a couple different approaches:
> <> Buy used/refurbished routers, switch and WAP
> <> Build routers using PC+GNU/Linux, buy switch/WAP
> <> Maybe use the server box as my firewall/proxy/primary router?
> Anyway, I'm curious as to what suggestions you all might have.
> Don
> -- 
> D.C. Parris, FMP, Linux+, ESL Certificate
> Minister, Security/FM Coordinator, Free Software Advocate
> http://dcparris.net/ <https://www.xing.com/profile/Don_Parris>
> GPG Key ID: F5E179BE
>
>
>
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