this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers hello there welcome to dan's notorious sandwiches home of the spicy tomato and pickle or the old stp as i like to call it what can we get going for you today hello may i have a cheesesteak with fried onions and ketchup please excellent choice dan we need a 168 1.10 up here what in the sam hell is that oh you see dan back there makes the best sandwiches in the world but he only takes orders and dotted decimal numbers i don't get it but again dude makes the best sandwiches in the world so we deal with it anyway i developed this system where i translate customers orders in word form into the numbers that please dan i named it after the shop dan's notorious sandwiches so i'm calling it dns it's pretty unprecedented if you ask me i can't imagine there's anything like this in any industry once the word gets out i'm pretty sure i'll have lots of people knocking on this door wanting to talk to me about it well here's your order ack thanks dan he makes me say ack every time he hands me an order too i don't get that either oh look he threw one of them spicy pickle jaws in there for you too have a nice day and if you got a minute stop next door and see my friends at the art of network engineering yes oh my god that was beautiful oh no come on leave the hat on oh you gotta leave it all come on oh i am aj murray that was tim burtino tim man you just you got this amazing talent i just you're you're you're a gifted person and i'm so glad we got you here how you doing sandwich time man sandwich time i'm hungry now i don't wanna i'm doing good aj how you doing i'm doing very well thank you thank you dan how are you i'm doing great how you doing very well very well today uh is my son's uh my older son's birthday i have two boys i'm an older son younger son happy birthday little blinky uh he turned 17 today wow yeah yeah so you're giving him the truck no way he can't drive yet he doesn't have a driver's license he's he's taking driver's ed this year uh so he listens to the show from time to time i hope he hears this episode so happy birthday son what what what i love uh about his birthday and i'm not i'm not saying this for any sort of recognition here but uh his birthday is today and my birthday is tomorrow so it's really cool that we're like birthday adjacent wow yeah wait how old are you gonna be old enough stan that's that's always my question but still not women i'm i'm still less than 40. so how old are you and how much you weigh i've never asked them how much they weighed i'll tell you my age before i tell you my weight a deal says it's your birthday where he is he's charlie he's a good guy oh yeah yeah go get a drink happy birthday nice happy birthday aj awesome nice excellent andy how are you hey man i'm good uh i fell off my bike on labor day but i avoided the hospital and i'm all bandaged up and you know i'm just looking for sympathy so i'm telling you that but um i kissed your boo-boo but you're far away oh thanks uh i'm just amazed that tim the intros get better every week i don't know how he's doing it um yeah but i love it it's amazing i used to really look you're a hell of a co-star you made me laugh sam hill happy to help i would have i would have hit a wall like after the first episode of the first intro be like that's it guys that's all i got oh man well i i think we're gonna uh rotate the the uh chair a little bit here and uh we're gonna let tim take the reins so uh tim she's all yours you have the con i don't know what that means it means i think i skipped that book in middle school what does he have did you say he has the bong he has the crap he doesn't watch star trek jesus christ oh i thought you said i thought you said the conch isn't that lord of the flies or something like that yeah yeah i think i need some help from the patreons i like i said i skipped that english class that day yeah i think the comments right that's the audience i don't know i always all right let's jump into these wins sorry help me out andy oh dear lord aj wanted to uh see if how many names i can mispronounce this week so i just want to thank the people coming up in the winning the names that i'm looking at phenomenal i should be able to get these ones lucky up first jordan gets ahead jordan accepted a new role as a technical support engineer at an msp which is jordan's second role in it congrats good job good job very nice very nice and now we have bill version 3 or bill v3 for short past the cwna certified wireless network administrator excellent nice and last but not least in the list trackit pacer is getting a promotion at work and moving off the overnight shift at the end that's big good job congrats congrats very exciting very exciting i used to work the midnight shift long time ago i worked at midnight shift for a year it almost killed me very i'm very happy for her she's getting off of that shift yeah lots of respect for sure you guys ever see her stuff she she posts these like one pagers you know like the one page study guides she did one on dmvpn it's like this shit is lit yeah the shit posts are hilarious yeah yeah it's good stuff good stuff congrats was she was she the one that was talking about throwing a uh or no no no she was i don't know 6 500 chassis she was trying to come up with some shit posts for that when she yep yeah i think that was her yeah she came out of nowhere and she's got so much good content she has these uh she streams herself studying for an rc and she's smart she's funny the the material annoys her which i really appreciate it's a very fun really interesting take it really is i've check out track and pacer on twitter and she has a whatever it's called rpan like a study streaming thing it's it's yeah it's informative i've walked around just listening because it helps me because i'm supposed to be studying this stuff so just listening to somebody talk about technology is helpful um but it's also very entertaining so yeah tracker pacer up and comer big time and then finally we have a new patreon to welcome f smith thanks for joining the team we really appreciate it thank you rock on all right let's just hear the goat and just remember for all your vpn needs you can turn to nordvpn nordvpn.com t-a-o-n-e or use the promo code t-a-o-n-e at checkout to get 73 off the two-year plan plus four months check out nordvpn you guys use our vpn what's that do you guys use nordvpn yes sir i did check it out yeah yeah yeah good stuff what's your what's your favorite part about it it's a vpn took my answer i like that it makes me invisible and i can right right be free i mean i was only going to see my traffic going to you know the other end of that tunnel and that's it you can't see my head that's right that's right as long as you're careful to not leak your dns you are invisible it is wonderful like how do you like do you just you know does a leak happen how does that work it happens to me all the time dan so my my my understanding is you just can't use your isp's dns servers because they're going to see you know if you have comcast as an example and they send you their router and i think by default the dns is going to happen with the comcast dns servers so that means every time you go to i don't know i heard once like something about piratebay.com or something like a place for torrents when you put that in your browser back to tim's intro the dns requests will go out to your isp and they'll go oh he's trying to get to a torrent site let me give him an ip while i'm at it log it and turn him into the fbi so he can go to jail all right so that's that's what yeah so you can so you can use dns um i believe nord has their own dns servers which are anonymous they don't log the big thing about nord that i love is they don't log anything um because there have been cases where the authorities go to the vpn provider and say hey we're looking into this guy we want to see all his stuff and nord is one of those companies they log nothing and yep there's nothing to get so you're truly anonymous yeah so they're doing they're doing it right there's some vpn providers out there that do log tell you they log and they'll say oh we're never going to release these but a subpoena will change that real quick yeah pretty quick so that's why i like nord what do you like about it uh aj they got a lot of add-on features too right yeah they got some good stuff i i think i brought this up before but uh you know i gotta mention it again they got this uh dark web uh part of their service where they will look online in the dark web for anything that's kind of like tied to your account that you used to sign up for nordvpn and you know i was checking it out and lo and behold i had a notification uh that there was a leak and it contained my email address and password uh combination credentials and i was able to go to that service change my password and then uh unfortunately it was not a service that used 2fa so i did have to go change the password to be safe and then you can clear it you can you know tell nor that you've taken care of that and that way it's kind of like off the to-do list so no it's it's good stuff i like it they have like a quick connect feature too you can just tap quick connect and away you go or you know you can scroll through the list they've got like i don't know i think it's over well over 50 different endpoints that you can vpn into uh and then like you can save them they have ones that are like um you know tuned for fast download or peer-to-peer sharing depending on what you're trying to do right i'm using nordvpn right now on my my computer as i'm recording the show and i can't tell the difference um i've never been able to tell the difference whenever i've been using this service so i think they do a great job see i wanted to ask you that aj is is that something you run on personal computer and uh mobile devices at all times you just turn it on at certain times like if you're out in a public place or yeah i i mean i tend to turn it on um when i leave the house when i'm home i i don't really care i mean i know my isp can see my stuff but i'm not doing anything stupid so um i trust my own home network i know what i'm doing on here uh it's all meraki stuff because i took the training and i got the free gear uh so i i can see what i'm doing um but i'm the only one that's watching what i'm doing at least on my home network right once at least my home network and it's the isp network and you know they're probably watching me but again i'm not doing anything that i wouldn't want someone else to know about it and i just i just want to add i'm not going to get on like a privacy soapbox but it's not just about doing stupid things you know sure sure there have been federal cases where there was wiretapping stuff going on and they found out and supreme court said no you cannot spy on everybody and again not a political show but there is everything's being surveilled all the time and it seems to just be fine so if you don't want everybody listening and watching to everything you're doing you know on the internet nordvpn is a great way to become anonymous on the internet if you value privacy right absolutely yeah man keeping an honest person honest there you go chris i thought dan just came up with that i'm like damn the way he said that too like that was majestic as hell he's writing the patriots he's reading his script over here so he stepped back that look on his face i'm like i thought that just popped in his head man yeah it popped on the screen that's awesome that's an excellent side chat let's uh let's get into it here fellas in this episode we are talking about something that probably all of us and and most of us in the patreon channel as well are very very passionate about we're going to be talking about home labs so beer sorry what home labs are why do we need them what do they consist of that kind of thing so i want to i want to kick this over to andy to start andy oh come on what come on bro you talk about this all the time andy what are home labs and why do we need them uh so my understanding of what a home lab would be for let's say constrain it to network engineering would be you would have your own say routers and switches at home and you could configure a network you could configure protocols you can break things and not have them affect you know production or your wife at home working from home like what the hell did you do to the internet so you know a home lab i've also used for syntax you know maybe before a change to throw something through there you know depending on the ios you're running and blah blah blah you know there's different commands um i have so i guess that's the the front definition of it right is a home lab and i'll tell you that in my last role on my last team uh there wasn't any funding for a real lab at work so i built a home lab and mimicked our wan set up yeah and then configured the port forwarding so that my whole team could get into my lab and you know if anybody wanted to get in there and lab stuff out uh you know they could we've since you know we've since got access to a lab at work but um i used my home lab and tried to help our team at work for you know labbing changes so that's my that's my quick definition there how'd i do tim well you well because you just already answered my next question sorry what i've seen home labs used a lot for is certification based training yep so i was going to ask you is that the only use case for them you kind of answered that and the answer is no and that you can use them to help yourself kind of get more immersed in things that you're dealing with at work as well so that's that was really cool especially cool that you did that and helped your team out never made everybody better that was awesome and i was thinking as a starting point we could even define you know what why what is labbing why is it important it may seem obvious to a lot of listeners but there's there could be people out there just getting started in their journeys maybe they have packet trace or maybe they don't but or somebody who's looking to pivot they heard about the ccna and they're you know like why would you even you know want a lab and i was i was thinking back just personally like i think the first time i ever labbed in my life was probably in college and chemistry you know you'd sit in lecture and you'd learn about i don't know what i forget all of it right but a citation of copper i i don't even remember what it was but after you would learn it in the book then you would go to a to a lab and put on your lab coat and goggles and stuff and then you would actually do things with compounds and apply the knowledge from the book to real world application and and for me that always made the concept stick it there's something about processes processing it in that tactile real world application you know the information that i think makes it stick in your brain other than just consuming you know material so you know you can apply it to what we do right uh when i was learning about bgp i could not remember the commands but because i was doing them in a lab over and over and something about that repetition and that application and the muscle memory and the keyboarding that just it kind of gets stuck in your brain so you know for me i can't really remember stuff long term unless i lab it that's just been my experience um and so so from from a network perspective it's not just going through books and memorizing commands you're actually applying what you learned from the books and repeating those commands and practicing them over and over again in physical real gear right yeah when i made eigrp neighbor up between two routers and then i got route sharing across them and and then i had an ospf domain over here and i started redistributing like it it it made the technology come alive to me which which got me excited when i built it and i saw it whoa because it just seemed a lot i don't know like look what i did like wow i made fires right right you know it's it's beyond rote memorization it's the application of the knowledge that when you're interviewing and that's what i've always i know you you started with me because i'm like the guy who likes to annoy people about labs but i think i think the best application of labbing and networking is that person trying to get their first job trying to get their foot in the door and had it's the chicken and egg scenario and how do you get experience without the job you can get all the experience you would ever want or need in a home lab and make all these protocols bow to your every whim and when you're sitting in that interview now well you've never worked on a production you know environment give me a console give me give me some gear i'll make it hum for you you know tell me what you need you know you can get that confidence because you've done it otherwise you feel like an imposter and you're like well yeah you just had my ccna and maybe i'm not good enough but that lab for me really gave me a lot of confidence interviewing and i brought it up in my interview for the job i have now um you know i i tried to play up the fact that i had a home lab and i had production gear at home and here's all the stuff i did and because i was trying to overcome that hurdle of not having actual build experience you know how do you get over that hump so that helped me so i want to stick with the the physical lab for a little bit and this this question is really open-ended to any of you guys when you have built home labs with physical gear how did you know what to get for a lab and where did you go get it research yeah jeremy chara yeah yeah he was all about the lab and he told me to go get three 26 20 xms and they're old and they run all the protocols and it was like 75 bucks for three of them and that's what i did jeremy had a whole series on labs and all kinds of blogs on labs he was all about the lab and jeremy was the one who told me that's that you know if you go to a surgeon you don't want a guy who's you know just watched videos and you want somebody with experience to him it was all about you got to get somebody with experience a lab gives you experience with the protocols with the technology and you can get down to the physical error i have fought for weeks a pin out on a rollover or a crossover or you know you name it and there are lessons you don't forget and when you're working with dc ops folks years later as a remote engineer like i am when we hit a physical issue it strikes a chord it you know tweaks a neuron it gets me in their head and i can start to walk through that all right let's look at this as the pin out you have a tester you can walk your way up the stack because remember in ccna they told me like 70 of network issues are physical i don't know if that's still true but getting good at the physical layer by the numbers statistically you can solve 70-ish percent of the problems i was going to say l2 issues yeah yeah right but and let's not you know we can go to physical but we'd almost want to start at packet tracer right it's all you need yeah it's free it'll get you through the ccna it'll get you that muscle memory that's where i wanted to go next so yeah let's pivot to people that are just starting out let's say that they they're trying to get into cisco they're trying to get into the ccna or just networking in general what's what's that first step for somebody who doesn't want to go jump on ebay and try to go get some physical gear so i think the big elephant in the room is physical versus uh versus virtual right let's hear it dan well uh it i have a different opinion um i think if you're starting out in this career you know a lot of people say what's the cheapest way to get into it right well you know i think there should be a different kind of mindset on that because you're talking about investing in yourself and you know how much is a college degree right like that's kind of all over the board but you're talking about thousands of dollars right um so if you're going to go the path of certifications you know spend a couple hundred dollars on yourself and your education and you're going to get that hands-on learning with the physical lab you don't have to do everything physical right you can mix physical with virtual you can definitely get like some kind of esxi server type thing i've got a dell r six something i don't remember but you can get you know ram cpu count those are the big things not so much storage but you can spin up little virtual machines and you can connect that to your physical gear as well and uh so i think i think it what i'm getting at is i think you need to invest in yourself a little bit but if you are trying to do it as cheap as possible yeah you can get uh cisco's packet tracer i'm pretty sure you can get that for free right like you just have to sign up account with netacad.com yeah exactly and uh and it's changed a lot too like back when i used it it was nowhere near as pretty as it is now yeah that's for sure yeah i think it's got a lot better but packet tracer is a hold on i'm going to get these words wrong it's not an emulator right i think it's a simulator simulator right yeah i think it might be running java on the back end i could be wrong but it's simulating the environment it's not actually running exactly and so the big difference between that is kind of what andy was just saying right like it's it's a it's not actually running the ios right it's just simulating if you put that command in what it would do um and so there's the difference between that a simulator and an emulator and an emulator would be more like gns3 or even g and even g is kind of what i've been going to now um but anyways packet tracer is free you can get started on your uh ccna for sure with that i think you could probably do everything ccna level impact tracer would you guys agree with that or i was just going to say that dan i i want to echo both the things that you and andy just said about packet tracer right i think that is a great way to get into it i i don't want people to feel like they have to in order to get started they have to go get the the physical lab i do think that there are a lot of positives to that but that can definitely be part of your long game you don't have i mean that shouldn't be the barrier to entry for you and i will say i didn't i haven't done the new ccna curriculum but the one that they just sunset a couple years ago that was the last one i got and i think out of the blueprint i was able to lab all but like one concept on packet tracer the uh like was like well i don't remember what it was but there was one concept that i went to a couple physical switches for but everything else was packet tracer and it is it's definitely come a long way packet tracer is plenty i think to get you the labbing you need for the ccna i think where the rubber would meet the road between packet tracer and either a physical or virtual lab i i keep hearkening back to like trying to get that first job trying to show people you have experience i'm not i used packet tracer for ccna and it was a godsend and wonderful and i can't say enough good things about it but i don't think it's gonna carry i don't say it's not to carry any weight but running simul you know a simulator in my opinion is nowhere near as good as an emulated or an actual environment i agree you know and i mean you're going to pay 400 bucks for the ccna exam give or take right i don't know how much they're up to now but you you can build a home a physical home lab for 200 bucks if you want you know two routers two switches and you're in so if you can afford the ccna exam you might be able to afford you know a little bit of gear for me it was an evolution i started with packet tracer because that's what netacad told me to use and i i didn't know any better and i did and it got me my ccna and then i got a job at the knock and all those guys were older dogs heavy hitters and they all got in my face and were like dude you need to build a physical lab right now yeah because that's what they all did and they knew the benefits of it so that's you know that's what i did and then i upgraded that a couple times i had the 2600s i got 1800s 1900s 2900 i had every darn old school you know sunset router that was out there 3550 switches got layer 3 on there yay got it and then i got fortunate enough to get a server from work hp dl whatever the heck it would proliant whatever it was but then like to your point dan i i started to learn and i think i bothered aj at this point i think we knew each other by then but you know how do i get a hypervisor on there and how do i get esxi on and know why would i do that well because now i can run virtual environments i can run eve i can run gns like i i don't know much about cml i think that's a different thing maybe we can touch that in a minute but yeah by learning by having a server and virtualizing my networking lab it forced me to learn virtualization technologies and not only learn them but apply them fight through the the hardware the well i had such a hard time with the drivers and like yeah i just could not get it working and like it was it was such a pain but i learned so much by standing up that server getting the hypervisor up and and and i'll use both if i have to lab now at home i usually just log into my eve that sits on my server as a vm i have the physical gear down there in the rack in case because for me i i don't know if i heard this but physical gear don't lie you know what i mean like there are goofy bugs like if you're running a virtual 9k in even g don't get me started i'll go on a rant you know you you can get something like bfd enabled configured but it'll never work and you might spend hours or weeks trying to troubleshoot white isn't working only to find out it's not a supported feature so you know real gear will not lie it will run that ios on those asics and work but that's my only gripe with the virtualized environments is you're not a hundred percent sure it's exactly correct right but it's pretty it's close enough right and and that's kind of like what okay so some of our patreons are they're kind of talking about that right now um they're they're i think it's uh yeah jordan said basically like you turn on a physical router and it's on there's no trying to there's no learning curve on trying to figure out the virtual side of it and all that you turn the router on it's on there you go so that's a good point jordan yeah i want to add to that as well with what andy was getting into and and what you just said dan with building that that virtual lab a deal said that as well he said i'm all for virtual but it can be hard to configure initially do you guys think that that's a barrier to entry that kind of turns people off or do you think there's a lot of people that andy take your stance where i'm going to tackle that because that's just another skill i can add on by picking up virtualization i i think it depends on where you are in your career yeah exactly if you have a certain amount of technical aptitude if you've been exposed to virtualization technology um it depends right like i i think that for somebody just starting out in it or network engineering and telling them to go get like an esxi server set it up do all that like that's gonna be overwhelming and scare them away right like if they have a mentor that can help them with that stuff great but you know i i think it might be just a tough pill to swallow for somebody just starting out if they're a member of a discord community with 1700 members that would be happy to help them myself included stand up a server i mean right that's what the community is about absolutely absolutely i'll make a video for you like you know we i would like but but totally aj i mean it is intimidating and it's it could be a barrier to entry but i also feel like there's a personality type or at least an intrinsic personality to people or an intrinsic curiosity in our personalities with people like us that's why we do what we do for a living right so if if you're plagued by curiosity like i am it's not that big of a deal to have this server you're not exactly sure what to do you have google you have youtube you have communities and people like us that can help and and to your point tim i think it's just gonna make i'm trying to look at the blueprint now i don't know if virtualization is in the new ccna blueprint i know it's in the ccmp blueprint but you if it's in the blueprint you might do yourself a favor by uh but it's gonna take time right and it's gonna take you know i don't know how much time you have and and you can't hurt like the deeper you go you can't hurt yourself with more experience right so it's like how much time do you have what kind of resources do you have are you just trying to get your ccna get packet tracer and make your life easier right because ccna is a big enough mountain to climb if you're especially new to all this well i think there's so kind of what i'm hearing is like if you're just get breaking into it and you're not 100 100 sure that you know this is the direction you want to go probably start with packet tracer right that way you can just drag and drop the router in there and the switch and whatnot and start with some ios commands and then if it starts like if you start you know that excites you and everything like that then maybe the next step is to step up to go get a couple of actual routers get a couple of switches you know hook them suckers up you know make a make an ethernet cable uh you know start start doing that kind of stuff and and then from there if it if you just if that excitement keeps going start looking digging into virtualization you know i think someone said in here earlier that with virtualization you can scale i mean that's 100 true right because if you you go buy six routers i mean now you've got all that gear that you you've got to run it it gets hot you know um everybody i know is studying for the ccie it's just a virtualized environment right and they just drag all that stuff in there and you know they got the horse but you could never buy all that gear i mean you could but why would you it'd be right yeah inexpensive i mean yeah very in power and heat all that stuff right i would have mentioned this too um i the first you know the first time i touched linux was trying to figure out my terminal server i have an avicent terminal server in my home lab that again the guys at the knock told me you know get a handful of routers and switches get a terminal server that plugs into each of the consoles you can jump you know between them so you don't have to keep moving the console cable and when i got that thing home and turned it on like what is this i had never seen linux i didn't know and there was a base config you had to put on there you know and that was another thing i wrestled with for a long time so they're you know if you have the time and you want the experience and again at that point in my career i had been a network engineer at a big isp noc for a year i wasn't like just starting at getting my ccm you know i i think there's a progression but it forced me to learn linux i got the darn thing working i occasionally have to touch you know linux at work now and i get to build you know at the very least i can navigate through the tree and the structure and know how to find things and get in directories and blah blah you know very basic linux stuff but my first experience with linux my first introduction was trying to figure out a device in my home lab yeah just something you'd never learn you know in packet tracer in gns and eve necessarily you know they're all wonderful tools like you said then for scale right perfect for ease just drag and drop stuff i love eve because of its multi-vendor support i think other people like gns are doing it now but i yeah leave eve was kind of first to market with that like you can build juniper out you can build i mean the list of vendors that eve supports is pretty impressive in my opinion yeah so in and also something just came up in my head to expand on you were talking about you know if if you have a virtual server that's another thing for you to learn right virtual technologies and stuff like that another thing too is if you're in the mood um you can with like gns3 so the way that gns3 used to work i i haven't touched it in a long time so if it doesn't still work this way then i apologize but gns3 used to you could spin up a virtual machine and that was the server right and then you had a client on your machine that you connected to the gns3 server with and that's how you you know dragged and dropped your your routers in there and whatnot well another thing you could have done with that is and this is aj and i actually started doing this way back in the day um we spun up a aws server so so i went and you know signed up you made an aws account right and then i spun up an aws server and i put gns3 server on that and then aj and i would take our clients from our computers at our houses and connect to that server and then that's how we had our gns3 set up that way so in the process i learned a little bit of aws as well so it the the sky's the limit when it comes to home labs and it doesn't actually you know we're talking about virtualization in aws well that's technically not in my home right so home lab can you know you can use that word uh however you want but your host doesn't have to be in your home i was gonna say is that the phrase now the home is where your vm is yeah exactly so i i think we've tossed around a lot of stuff so let's let's back up let's let's go you know 50 000 foot view here right like we talked about um packet tracer packet tracer is from cisco it's available from the cisco network academy this is the fail fast fail cheap option right like if you just want to get started if you don't have any experience and you want to play packet tracer is the way to go okay physical app um what have you guys heard is like the recommendation for devices i've heard three to four routers and like three to four switches if you can swing it you get three to four layer three switches so that way you have a total of eight devices that can do uh routing right yep that's that's what i built and that that's like the ideal you know uh ccna level lab yeah well i think uh really two routers for ccna level right you could but then you can't redistribute anything you need a third uh just as an example right there yeah you're right yeah i mean you could do and i don't know if you need to know redistribution and ccna but like right that's what comes to mind like why i'm like oh yeah i need a third because i can't redistribute between two all you need is two for the ccna most right yes probably now now what kind of routers because in my home lab i've got um 2821s and i've got 1941s so i i would say the new the new curriculum is based off of ios 15. so any device that you go get for your lab should be capable of running ios 15. if it runs ios 12 that's fine i think older devices like the 2800 series are going to run ios 12. it some command syntax has changed between 12 and 15 you just have to be aware that you're not really tested a ton like there's no simulations in the new exams but you will get you know syntax related questions right like what's the proper syntax to execute to fix the problem that you see here on your screen kind of thing um so you know anything you get should run ios 15. so we're talking 2900 series routers isrs um 29 60 series switches and then uh 3750s 38 50s but that's probably still going to be a little bit more expensive because those are those are still i think those are still supported they're not end of life yeah so i'm looking at ebay right now and uh let's hear 37.50 is roughly let's see here about 60 to 70 bucks and that's a let's see that's a 24 port yeah 24 port right there so yeah 24 port that's all you need you don't have to have a 48 port switch um 3750 24 ps they want 60 bucks for it on ebay so yep no i was going to say now you're going to make me check i don't even know what code's running on mine yeah on there excuse me while i hit my remote power management here and turn my home lab on i got that too i love it so i can go check my uh yeah fancy hang on turn your vpn on first it's always on brother oh okay or vpn yeah um so you can get layer two switches the 2960s i think are a great option like having a layer two switch is better than not having any switch right so um i personally have two layer two switches i have two 2960x uh s's i have two 3750s and i have four isr 2k so i i've got like three 2911s and 12901 um i got the 2960s for free so that's why i have two layer two switches um yeah the the caveat i would say is is that there are some switches that run a version of ios called lan light and lan light is not going to do everything you need to do for ccna it will do probably 80 to 85 percent but there's going to be some things that landlight just can't do okay so be on the lookout for that and if you if you get a switch that has land light it's not like you can upgrade it because the the problem there is flash capacity you're not going to be able to get like the full ios and put it on a land light switch all i was really running switches for see i only needed and like you were saying damn they're pretty cheap like you can get 35 50s i don't know if they're 50 bucks a piece or even less now but and i even made the guy an offer and he cut your person and he cut me like 20 30 bucks off the price like hey if i buy three or four you know do i get a deal so i got him for a really good price and all i was using them for was spanning tree i wanted to see the ports blocked and what they did i wanted to bundle um you know ports into an ether channel and see what happened and it's yeah you know i know that the the blueprints have changed since i was studying switching but as far as as far as i needed i really just needed spanning tree i wanted to see spanning tree i wanted to see loops i wanted this you know put some ether channel together i didn't need anything too fancy they were layer three i could run bgp on them but like i i wasn't i really just wanted them for spanning tree on ether channel another another great option though is uh you can just go get you an old 45 10 and uh with 348 port line cards what you got there behind you there dan no no i mean i use that no i'm joking you definitely don't need a chassis switch so so we could probably do like a whole episode on hardware for labs but i think we if we're gonna do that we should definitely have taylor on here because he's the master of shopping for hardware like he's nice i know he's picked up switches for like 25 bucks like decent switches like he's like the deal hunter so but one thing i do want to mention too is not only just like switches and routers um so there's a thing that cisco uses i mean we're talking about cisco right now so uh but the h-wick cards h-w-i-c yep cards um that was one thing when i first started i had no clue what that was right and and so i i had to do some research on which card do you need because they've got all these different cards right you know they've got talking like the t1 cards is that what you mean like yeah yeah they've got you know they've got let's see here the the 4e sw so that's like a four port switch right so those aren't gonna be i don't think those are layer three interfaces so i think the the ones that have the routed interfaces are hold up yeah so these two fes right so that's a fast ethernet uh with two ports on it um so these switches are i mean these routers that we were talking about like the 2800s um they've got those modules in the back that you can you can plug these cards into and that gives you more routed interfaces on them so that you can just do crazier topologies and whatnot yeah i do dan i bought a for 40 bucks i bought a car like a four port you know card for just one because those 26 20 routers i had i don't know if they like one ethernet port they were they were kind of limited so yeah you know that trying to look for the name of it but yeah the same i was able to add routed ports which was helpful they were only they were on ethernet they're only 10 megs but you know they they work that's all i needed exactly right well and actually using 10 megs with your onboard 100 meg that would give you you know your weights and stuff like that uh another thing too is now i haven't looked at the blueprint on the new ccna but our serial interface is still used no they've dropped that completely yeah yeah they're they're not doing any serial interfaces or anything like that i think everything's either going to be faster doesn't mean you won't run into it in the world though that's true in the world a lot of old stuff out there that but yeah so uh just that's something to look into because you'll you'll get in there quick and a lot of these routers only have like two interfaces and if you wanted you know a crazier topology where you know maybe you have three of them or three or four of them connected up and whatnot uh a you can get some of those cards so that you can you can do that and then another thing to talk about too is um i've got this pulled up cables because like you can buy stuff off of amazon uh i've i've definitely bought some cables off amazon but a a site that i really like is uh it's called mono price and we can we could definitely put this in the the description um but like 80 cents for you know let's see what is this for like a three foot cable it's like 80 cents a cable i mean that's so cheap dan and guess which moron on this panel builds his own cables to this day i well let me let me defend that a little bit though right like i think when you're first starting out you definitely should build your own cables and you can go to monoprice and get a thousand feet of cat5 all day sit out by the pool man i made so many i terminated so much ethernet in the field as a tech that i don't want to lose that it's it's kind of tricky and you can screw it up and there's some art to it and oh yeah you know it's a craft so anytime i need a cable at home i make one because i just don't want to lose the skill but yeah mana price is much smarter just just get your jumpers there it's it's so cheap well i definitely think i definitely think you should build your own cables though because i think it's a random passage yeah exactly right and and but once you know you get past that phase i guess uh mono price maybe not for andy or well andy can at least buy you know a thousand foot of it well it's it's more than just communications cables too right they do hdmi they do yeah yeah different kinds of stuff i make my hdmi too tim i'm sorry i don't get out of here i did try to splice i did cut an hdmi and try to splice it as a project at comcast that didn't work yeah so guys we've been talking about platforms and and how to get going with putting labs together so once you have your platform selected physical virtual or a simulator using packet tracer how would you walk somebody through getting started somebody who's got their ccna ocg do you just read about a topic and and try to put some uh router switches together in your lab are there guided lab offerings online that you would recommend how does somebody get started once they have their platform stood up for for past packet tracer there are tons of youtube videos out there that will like give you a topology walk you through setting it up show you the verification commands and then you know there's like the break fix ones david bomble has a huge series on on packet tracer labs uh and and i know there's tons tons more out there so you know i think the studying trifecta right is you got your books you get your video series and then you got your labs and a practice exam of some kind so you know any video series you watch is going to have some sort of labs to go with it right whether it's you know cbt or pluralsight or you know anything usually has some sort of like partner material that you can download and you know walk you through the labs and sometimes they even give you like the base code to put on your devices so it like it couldn't be you know easier to do yeah and also so back when i was studying for the uh icd-1 um one thing i also bought like a book was i think it's called 101 labs uh yeah and that was really helpful because you just it's just constant labs of the different topics and whatnot and you can take those um well i mean that's what i did right so i just took the lab that was in there and i built that topology on my physical equipment and then i did the lab so that because i think like one thing that i run into sometimes is not having a scenario right yeah and when you have a scenario a purpose of what you're trying to lab that makes it so much easier than just trying to like shoot from the hip and well i'm just gonna set these two routers up and try to get them talking to each other you know uh but if there's a purpose it it see to me it makes it stick in my head a little bit better yeah when i went through netacad they came with lab books so you would have you know different lab books for the different sections to to give you labs you could build and i've seen them floating around too people suggest different cisco press lab books or you know and definitely dancing having that um different scenarios i mean you don't have to have a lab book you could just mess around too like if you want to but i personally like a guided especially in the beginning like i know this stuff what am i going to do um and i i just thought as you guys were talking like i've been using here's one thing i learned in a not too long ago in my home lab i have been using a route map for seven years and it's been working and i thought it was working because i understood how it was working and it was a deny all route map for you know when you're bringing up a new circuit with with an isp and you want to denial routing first get it up you know burn it in quote unquote make sure it's stable before you put routing on it and i'm working on a youtube video and i'll you know i won't get tuned in in the minutia but it was only working because there wasn't a second line in the route map as soon as somebody and i think it was on discord they called it out they're like add another sequence and i did nothing was blocked anymore so a route map that i've been using in production forever that i thought i understood how it was working it only worked because it was a temporary measure while i burned in circuits and then i'd rip it out and replace it when we'd bring up routing i labbed it up at home and i'm like son of a put that second sequence in and all the routes bled in and i'm like oh god i'm glad that happened at home and not at work so yeah and that's a concept i thought i knew inside and out that i used all the time so you know that's why i love a lab whether it's syntax whether it's you know you might think you understand how something works just because you get a result when you use it you may not fully understand what's happening under the hood and that lab will will show you every time and you don't want to lab in production that's a bad idea sound i don't know what you're talking about remember what i said you just i just say yee haw and send it that's great so so i think one thing too i know this episode is more about home labs but you kind of hit on it a little bit earlier sometimes companies especially i would say the smaller the company uh the less they have a budget for lab equipment right and in setting up a lab it's definitely been a struggle of mine trying to get because because here's the thing is like you know some of the stuff that we use in production is not cheap right and and sometimes you have to have a copy of whatever's in production in the lab to fully i'll give you the perfect example is uh aci you you can you can use their virtual aci uh i forget what it's called uh aj do you remember what it's called yeah i think there's an aci emulator like emulator you can run it it's not full aci it can it exactly does like certain things it it looks and feels like aci but right but in in a network that's the size of the one i work in it doesn't make um it doesn't make i guess it's harder financially to go buy a whole nother uh spine leaf setup you know it just it costs so much money that i don't think our management would even you know approve that right uh but maybe in a company andy's size maybe that's worth it to them right you know i i don't know but uh what i'm getting at is sometimes it's a struggle and especially someone who's starting out maybe you're in a help desk or something like that you might not have access to the lab equipment at your place right and if you do are you at a smaller company to where maybe they're not going to fund you know some of the more expensive lab equipment um what are what are some of y'all's experience on that though like i know my experience and it's been a struggle so what about you guys i i think the lab what's funny about like labs is there's there's production there's lab or dev but then there's also the prod dev right the production development area the production lab right like uh all too well the full send area no no no no no what what i mean to say is is that it's it's dev but it's it's the closest copy of prod that there is without being prod and yeah so even though it's a dev area you can't go play in that area because it's production dev well i know that one too because you know our episode that we were talking about uh change management i've had to actually open a cab for a dev system that became prod basically yeah it's like guys it's dev it has it in the name so so i i say all that too to to now say like i work for a partner we have a lab but it's like a prod lab right like it's it's the demo environment like if we want to do a proof of concept for a customer or something like that like it's it's so fragile that like you know we want to get in there and play with aci but aci is what runs this entire environment that we do all these demos and host things and to show customers how to do stuff so learning aci in this environment is not on the table it runs on hyperflex and so learning how to stand up hyperflex from scratch is not an option because it has to be running in order to like do it so really like you could really only do anything if it's a virtual machine and even then like they're only going to carve out so much for you to do and play so it just makes more sense to have home lab because then i can do you know fire at will kind of thing tim what about you man do you guys always what do i always talk about guys it's it always comes back to culture right yeah yeah it's where you're at it is going to determine uh what you can get to work on right um and if you're in a culture where they believe in learning and training and development you're in good shape i think something else that that you can look at and i think aj was getting into this is this is probably more so if you're looking into a new technology but there are uh multiple vars out there where it's more of a proof of concept thing but if you can get in with a partner that they'll have lab environments that you can connect to or probably not as much anymore but but some bigger vars would have local sites where they would fly you out and you could go in and they would build up your environment for you or uh tim mack in the discord would do that at cisco for for customers uh when they were going through pocs so i think there's multiple ways to get going uh but definitely for the people starting out get in with that low barrier to entry gear uh packet tracer anything you can get your hands on to get going and know that it's it's a marathon not a sprint you don't have to have the best lab in the neighborhood day one uh take your time understand the stuff and and just get into it over time yeah so no lab at work tim sorry movie no i do actually i'm just messing with you and i mentioned it earlier dan but what you know this you know this big company that i work at years ago on another team under different management we we had no lab and i'm pretty sure they had the you know the revenue but uh our leadership at the time you know we just we we didn't have one i don't want to tell you we were labbing and proud but we had nowhere to test which is why i built it out at home because i just thought it was very you know um foolish way to operate so and then stuff would break and they'd get all you know pissed and start pulling back and taking away our ability to do stuff you know it was this constant i mean that's culture like you said tim and it was just that particular culture it was different leadership it was a different company at the time but we just could not get a lab funded no matter what and it was very difficult to you know now we can build and see what's going to happen when we roll out something or touch something or swing something and and that's nice to be able to see in the lab uh you know before it wasn't like that and it was just not fun it was not happy fun times because you never knew what was going to happen you know you just you had no idea they're like all right well you're sweating bullets trying to make it implement something yeah every every time you're like well we'll see you know yeah i i will echo that we were actually in the last year or so we were able to get a hold of um nes x host and we got eve on there and i have had multiple maintenance windows that i have been able to prep much better than i ever had in the past because of that like fairly significant cut overs that i have felt a lot better because we got the backing to be able to use that server to do that and set that up in shop so yeah i'm i'm definitely thankful for that and there's no shortcut to gaining that confidence before the actual window right unless you have that and you can run through it it's such a great feeling walking in knowing all right i've seen this work oh definitely unless we trip on something really strange we should be fine here all right so what do you guys think what have what have we missed let's start bringing this together i think one thing we missed was uh cml yeah i i was going to say like i wanted to kind of touch on like the different virtualization you know kind of platforms yeah if we could for sure yeah definitely so who knows about cml i do i have it awesome i was in it today i actually set up a new copy today okay so what is it high level like explain to me because i don't i've heard of it i think it's like a as a service right you pay a year for uh so it's it's definitely a license thing so so cml is cisco modeling labs uh it is the predecessor not predecessor the successor to viral and i forget what viral stands for but so there's a couple of different platforms out there there's gns3 uh there's even g and even g has a straight up free community edition and they also have a professional edition and there's there's definitely some worthwhile features in the professional edition and i believe every year they do like a black friday sale and you can pick it up for a really good price you can get like a year and a half 18 months worth of license for i think the same price as one year or less than one year i forget how they do it um and then there's cml so these platforms allow you to virtualize ios images and juniper images and all these other like network device images and they run and act like real devices and so much in fact that when i run a nexus 9k and cml it will crash and go to the bootloader that's how authentic it is um so question yeah can you run juniper can you run junos in cml um i believe you can i i haven't done it but i'm pretty sure that you could like anything that you can do in even g i'm pretty sure that you can do okay that's a smart move then if that's true yeah yeah smart move by them okay yeah yeah because if you wanted to try to do like a multi-vendor environment with cisco stuff and another vendor like i'm pretty sure you can do that i'm gonna go research it after the show can you do me a favor in your free time if you can get bfd neighbored up and working across two virtual 9ks and cml i might buy it because you can't do it in the v9k's and eve dude let's do it let's do it let's let's play with it i'd love to play with it with you that'd be cool so um the caveat i'll throw out there is that these all need to run on some sort of hypervisor you can there is an option to run some of these on bare metal uh you can run even gm bare metal i'm pretty sure you can run um i think you can run all of them on bare metal but they also come with a virtualization option um so if you have a hypervisor either a type one hypervisor which runs on bare metal so you can get some server hardware install a hypervisor on there run some virtual machines they can also run in type 2 hypervisors which is like your vmware you know fusion uh there's also vmware workstation on windows and then there's a bunch of other you know platforms open free for download use and you can import the templates for the virtual machines and and start them up which is exactly what i did today on my work machine i had to lab something up so i have a license i i was way behind on the updates so i just you know deleted my old cml lab and fired up a new one another question do you have to install cml or is it like in the cloud so you you have to run it it's okay you need that's what you were saying you need to it's a virtual machine yeah i i run mine as a virtual machine i have a dell precision laptop for work that has some extra horsepower extra memory so that i can run virtual machines and does it take care of the um you know the licensing issue that people run into like if you buy physical or you have eve you need the images right like ios do they supply you with the images so so some people will actually buy the license for cml because part of cml is an iso that has all of the images on it and they'll take the images and they'll run them in a different platform like gns3 or even g so they'll buy the license just to get the images and not actually run cml and i think that's something a point that we have to make out right like when you get gns3 or you get even g or any of that stuff those don't come with the images right right you have to go get a cisco image or a juniper image or palo alto image or whatever image you're trying to emulate you have to go get the image and that's the elephant in the room right because well even even with the physical gear right like my 2620s that i got my first lab didn't run bgp i happened to work at a place and i had my cco account and i could download it and you know but yeah i mean and you're right dan anything besides packager like physical gear eve gns like you need those those images to run the software so that's i think that's the beauty of cml right yeah it now you do have to pay for it right but right you get all those images with it so that's nice you don't have to try to be like hacker and illegal and go download cisco ios images and i will say like cml comes with a lot more than just ios like it comes with ios router ios switch but it also comes with ios xr and it also comes with nexus so like you can actually lab nexus 9k i think it also has a version of uh nexus nodes with 7k code in there too so um yeah it's it's good stuff i think they have like a csr 1000 uh as well so you can you can do some cool stuff um there are licensing limitations so there's two different versions there's cml personal and then their cml enterprise cml enterprise if you host it in a larger environment you can have a bunch of different people logging in there working on various labs cml personal is more for you know one one or two people to work on something and then there's two different licensing um there's just like the cml personal which will let you do up to 20 nodes so you can run 20 nodes at a time as long as the hardware you're running on it will support that right like on my laptop there's no way i'm running 20 nexus 9ks like the even though it's simulated or virtualized it's still they're still beefy so um i would need a substantial amount of hardware to be able to virtualize 20 nexus 9k nodes if 20 is not enough you can do the cml personal plus and that's 40 nodes so you can run up to 40 devices in an environment and that's good to know it's single user only i'm looking on their site now because back when we were studying for encore i was trying to figure out like a group lab that we could leverage and i don't think i i could be wrong but i don't think even g allows like the not the community version you have to buy the pro for like multiple users yeah so that's what you'd have to go to enterprise for i guess right well i think that was one reason why like we did the gns3 the way we did we put the server up in aws that way whoever ever whoever had the image could put the image on that server and then we could both utilize it right so you too could both log into that instance and lab collaboratively if you want yeah yeah it's nice it's it's pretty cool um but that's that also bring what you were talking about aj that brings up another point if you if you do go virtual you got to make sure you got the hardware to run whatever your topology is right like you can't you can't just go get a server that has you know four gigs of ram and a in a quad-core cpu and and boom there you go you can run like 30 devices on there that's not that's just not going to happen these these uh these devices have to use resources right and so and this is like virtualization of a router or a switch platform like as if you're running a router or a switch so i it actually requires a bit of memory and processor to run like i showed you how i can tell you on eve because i ran into it the even g requirements for the nexus 9k you need two cpu cores and eight gigs of ram per device yep it is a hog it it is a hug yeah and it adds up pretty quickly yeah um yeah yeah and so um you know i definitely would recommend you know depending on like the size of your topology and and not just the size of your topology but like what andy was saying you know if you're running four nexus 9ks uh you know that's not a very large topology but you're going to have a lot of resources consumed right there um so depending on that you got to keep that in mind right you know a 16 gig server or desktop whatever that you turn into a server might not be enough i mean it might be enough for the basics right you know um but you just got to keep that in mind like what what kind of stuff are you want to run are you wanting to run really advanced things uh you might need more like 32 or 64 gigs ram or something um i think i was watching keith barker on his palo alto series and i think his lab he's got like 128 gig ram server so he's got a pretty beefy server so that can run a lot of different things i i've also seen people here in the chat they've mentioned it a few times uh the intel nook the nuc or nook or however you want to pronounce that um you can get different it takes a yeah so eric saying uh it takes up to 32 gigs of ram um so that's you know that that's pretty powerful for uh you know a lot a little lab machine because those little intel nooks are like they're like these little little computers like this big you know so they don't take up a lot of space they don't produce an insane amount of heat because that's another thing if you get a rack mount server and you put it in a closet or in your bedroom or your office or wherever you you have your home lab at those things make really loud noises the fans are like this small and they use a lot of power yeah they they take a lot of power they produce a lot of heat oh wow what are we talking about servers yeah yeah well if you if you got a virtual environment you know yeah i got a low power profile on mine it's pulling about 300 watts at max it it doesn't it doesn't get that but it sounds like a jet engine when it starts up right yeah yeah yeah but but you're right it does take resources and you you were making me think dan the only thing i haven't tried and everything we've talked about that i'd like to because it'll help me learn is i think i'd like to spin up an environment you know an aws or like a cloud provider just to yeah now i'd like to learn how to do that you got to make sure though that um it you're like i i'm not sure if even g if you can spin that up in aws i would assume you can i think i can spin anything up in there well it's the cloud doesn't it's just someone else's computer the cloud can run you know the world and it can't run eve we got a problem well there are limitations because if you're if you're virtualizing you're virtualizing a virtualization platform so the processor has to be able to support that yeah and that that's where you can run into issues and i think that that's one of the issues that dan and i ran into when we were playing with aws and gns3 is that we were limited to the kind of uh ios images that we could run okay yeah yeah so that's there is a little bit of a caveat there you're you're virtualizing on a virtualized platform and there's there's some weird shit that happens i like making a copy of a copy it's inception right like you're virtualizing within virtualizing it's a zipper zip the hell with the cloud i'm not i'm not virtual i'm not no i'm not building in the cloud i'm sticking to my server i love it it's quiet it doesn't but you know make sure that if yeah make sure that your home lab is not near any water sources because my lab has taken a few swims it's still alive but you would think the basement's a good place because it it won't the noise and heat won't bother you the water runs down all your plumbing terminates in your basement and you might have a you might have a flood something to think about when you're standing up your gear at home yeah for sure ah what do you think fellas i think we've done this one yeah this was fun i knew this was going to be going to be pretty big for all of us because i didn't get on a soapbox right and now i get beat up about soapboxing no i'm just messing with you here's let me let me let me let me put a butt what do we say that how do we put it on it put it on yeah i'll end with what i always say when we talk about labs is um not so much anymore but i guess i used to be much more verbal on socials and such about the benefits of a physical lab and man you want to piss off a certain percentage of the network engineering community tell them that a physical lab is beneficial and they just come out of the woodwork and call you every awful name that you know hurt your feelings so um all i can tell you is huh well i was gonna say that i mean that's a certain type of person there right well it is but but there's there's more of them that you would think i mean i know the internet's the wild west but yeah i can just speak from my experience and i can tell you that building a physical lab i learned things that i would have never learned in an emulated in a virtual environment right i don't know how useful they are in you know i'm sure i would have been fine without it but again for me i keep going back to that ccna thing they told us that most of the problems you run into are going to be physical and in my and maybe it's because i'm a former field guy but i wanted to master the physical layer of the osi model as much as i could so that i could work my way up the stack if most of the problems are at the physical i wanted to run into cabling problems and card problems and blah blah blah blah and you know even pin outs on um i was using the t1 wet cards you were talking about earlier dan because they're cheap interconnects you can add to you know inexpensive routers and i couldn't get them up for the longest time in the airport i'm messing with csu dsu clocking and then i found that the t1s have their own damn pin out it's not a crossover it's not a rollover it's not a street a t1 has its own pin now it will never come up unless you use the specific pin out so again just one example of like i think learning the physical is important uh you know so for for me i think a physical lab is very helpful if you can afford it if you have the time blah blah blah and we've made all the other points here if you can't afford it pekka tracer is great and you know if you want to show you have experience when you're trying to break in the industry with a ccna i think that building a physical lab for me in my experience is the best way you can get over that hump and show experience so that's my that's my bow nice what do you got damn though i'm just same thing he did it well because i like one of his points he was talking about a pin out well i think uh in one of jerry uh uh jeremy chara's uh videos he was actually making a bad cable right i'm not sure if you can do that in a virtual scenario they might at this point now have a way to just you know simulate that but i i don't know off the top my head that they do uh so there you go you you can you can create a bad cable in on a physical uh physical gear and see how it acts right like you can actually see the errors and that kind of thing right so yeah i i'm totally 100 in agreeance with andy on that like i think a physical lab is definitely the way to go i don't like the i'm not going to say anything an excuse but i don't like the well physical lab is expensive i mean because you're trying to improve yourself it's it's an investment i think you should spend the money on yourself now maybe the the one um way to argue with that would be like you know if you're not sure this is what you want to do yet then i definitely say do download packet tracer start crunching away on on the simulator in there if it if it tickles your fancy start going getting some physical gear and get that going and uh i'm sorry and then and then you get to get the virtualization after that you know oh i can't look at tim i'll jump in there um if you work for a company either in the network space or you're in the help desk and you you know the network folks and you get along with them if there is specific gear that you can work on even if it racks in the office that you can just work on there's a couple technologies that are hard to virtualize and expensive to get in the cisco space i'm thinking things like a virtual switching system and stack wise virtual they require specific hardware but it's stuff that's out there in the wild so if you can get that to practice on at work maybe before stuff's been deployed or if there's some stuff on the shelf take any opportunity you can even if you don't have the stuff at home uh take that opportunity so i'll jump back to don't let a barrier to entry stop you get into packet tracer first get into any of that stuff uh the virtualized stuff the simulator stuff that'll get you going and and take it as a marathon just go from there you got anything else aj um yeah i just want to echo what dan said you know like you're you're investing in your future um i i think the rule of thumb is like what two two to five percent something like that you should take your income and invest it back in yourself um you know if you you work in it already and you work for a company that will maybe reimburse or provide you training talk to them about getting lab gear sometimes that can be part of it right like if they're going to pay for your training maybe they'll help you get lappier maybe they have gear at work they're going to retire uh and you know why throw it out and the e-waste bin when you can plug it back in and give it a next useful life right the other thing i'll say is limitations there's limitations no matter what you do they're all over the place and you're going to run into them if you use packet tracer when you're using packet tracer and you start to notice the limitations of packet tracer that's when you know when you're learning and you're doing well and two it's time to upgrade that's a really good point there's i i don't i think a lot of people have this idea of camps right like there's a physical camp and a virtual camp like there's benefits to both um if you can you know only afford one then i would say like you know you gotta weigh where you're at in your learning journey how much money can you invest like i would say to buy a server and a license of either even g or cml is going to be the same as probably buying a decent home lab kind of situation so when you do the home lab thing there's limitations to ios right like if you have if you don't have the right ios on a device you might not be able to do bgp or you might only be able to do stub ospf instead of the full ospf so you're go you're going to hit things like that and then the same thing with uh virtualization right like those are very vanilla routers and switches you're probably not going to have a ton of interfaces you might not have a variety of interfaces you're not going to be able to do fiber in a virtual environment so if you wanted to play with fiber sfps and the different media types like then you know you're going to want to do something like physical like just really understand what it is that you're trying to learn and do and pick the best solution for you i personally have a combination i have cml on my work laptop and i have a physical lab at home and depending on what i'm trying to do will determine which one i fire up and play with that day so it's a wonderful world out there and uh having these tools at your fingertips will definitely bring your learning to the next level can we go around the horn as a final thing and what do you use as your you know in your home lab when you need to lab something you use physical or virtual i'll go first i i i use virtual i just i hop in eve and i bang out what i need and yeah same here andy and i use a mix of both i have physical and virtual yeah so i have both but what do you use both yeah probably i probably use virtual more now um okay but yeah i still use physical everyone as well gotcha yeah aj i've got both which honestly it depends on what i'm doing right like yeah um if i'm doing data center stuff i'll use cml because i don't have physical nexus you're not taylor you know no i'm not i'm not dealing i'm not doing my wife would probably kill me if i got back from my basement so uh it's interesting so today i had to fire up cml so i could work with some customers code and try out some stuff um it was just easier to do i only had like a couple of devices to work with my home lab is pretty tuned for things that i like to learn and play with so if i'm doing customer stuff i typically fire up cml because then i can you know delete the router add a new router or whatever pretty easily yeah and that message i i that's why i love that i love the convenience of virtual that's all it's yeah press a button fire it up drag it in there and you know you're running the code i like virtual yeah after i just went on and on about physical i didn't see a soapbox man that's why i was laughing because you said virtual and i was like you just got on to these people i'm 14 years into my technical career you know i wasn't you know i i i think it's a progression right i think that you evolve and what you need i i don't really need to learn as much physical these days but yeah it's just a good uh great topic and uh really enjoy i'll always talk about home labs man i love it yeah anything to make yourself better well with that fellas uh thank you all for joining us uh for this episode like subscribe follow anywhere you can find us uh get in that discord and chat with us help each other out and we will see you in the next episode be sure to get down to dan's for some world famous sandwiches thank you see you later hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of netench that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you