michael.dillon@bt.com wrote:
The magic answer to training setups: one big fat Xen box with a lot of VM's, virtual interfaces and of course: Quagga.
You said "magic". Does this mean that there is a site where you can download ISOs for this big fat XEN box?
www.debian.org www.ubuntu.org www.fedoraproject.org .... I guess you know how that works. (apt-get install quagga, *xen etc.. read the various FAQ's online) XORP is of course also a great one, but doesn't have the 100% cisco-alike feeling. You could possibly even use livecd's for this. It might be an idea for somebody indeed to make a pre-cooked iso which does something like this, then again, like quite a few other things, as it is quite specific, a mere "howto build a fat Xen-Quagga howto" might be more appropriate than yet another distribution...
That said of course, who still types directly into their routers? I do hope that folks use one of the nice (custom) router/device management tools out there which avoids all of that.
You still have to figure out what to put into such a tool and that often involves quite a bit of labwork where you type things into routers and watch the results.
Of course, but that is why, when you build a network, you first set it up in a lab. You can't make something when you don't know what you are going to do with it. A good extensible design and above all, a lot of experience, will help a lot in that area. Greets, Jeroen