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Introduction
Unlike many systems you may encounter in your studies and in industry, NetLab is
not a simulator but a system which allows managed remote access to live router,
switch and firewall systems.
Accessing NetLab
Depending on the location of your tutor and the volume of demand, you may have
an account on
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NetLABS a brief guide
Booking a session
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NetLABS a brief guide
You will be presented with the scheduler, which will provide access to a multitude of
Pods and a diary, which you can book for up to 4 hours use, 24 hours a day, 7 days.
The only limitations imposed are:
• You can only have one session, in each 24 hour period, as we wish to ensure
everyone can have a fair access.
• NetLab automatically deducts 10 minutes to reset the system from any booking.
• We would appreciate a conservative booking policy by yourself, if you only need
2 hours please book 2, not 4.
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NetLABS a brief guide
When your booked time has arrived the system home page will show your
Scheduled labs with an ‘ENTER LAB’ link.
The system will take a maximum of five minutes to initialize the pod, whereupon you
will be able to start work.
Many exercises are based on the mesh topology as this provides the simplest, best
experience of WAN load balanced and redundant routing.
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NetLABS a brief guide
Accessing a router
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NetLABS a brief guide
One of the considerable benefits of NetLab is the ability for students to save their
work and recall this at a later date. In your lab, you can see the Load and Save
links.
The NetLab server allows you to copy all of the router configurations to a personal
file store which can be viewed by your tutor, thus aiding our ability to help you with
your studies.
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NetLABS a brief guide
No technology is perfect and routers, being complex systems will have their five
minutes. If you need to
restore the pod, whilst you
are working on your lab,
you can do so, the action
link, offers: -
If all else fails, book a new session on NetLab using the previous-configuration
option, NetLab will do the rest.
If you feel the problem is beyond reasonable personal intervention, please in the first
instance approach your tutor, who may be able to assist or contact the
administrators for NetLab.
In the nicest possible sense, NetLab will run for years without many issues, often the
problem is the user not entering the right command on the router. But this is all part
of the learning experience.
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NetLABS a brief guide
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NetLABS a brief guide
The configuration is
standard ‘Cisco’ format
and can be copied into
other Cisco equipment,
also NetLab allows you to
edit this file for a future
exercise.
Edit file
option
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