Question New to networking. Looking for steeping stone help - Cisco 2800

[willeatpants]

Hey

I am working in NoC and my company is letting us play with any machines that are labeled as Ewaste.

I am playing around with a Cisco 2800 but I have almost no experience with this.

The only thing I know how to do is
Flash OS - Did this for Cisco 3800, I assume its the same method for 2800
Hook up the switch to my work laptop with a serial cable and use Tera Term for the console.

That about the gist of what i know what to do.
Ive played around with Cisco commands to see what I could do.

Problem I have run into is when i google about this I find videos and post about this BUT on one really mentions what software YOU MUST HAVE before you do anything
(I took me too long to find out how to display the router on a CLI)

1. what software is needed to use a Cisco 2800 and what software is needed to run and maintain this.
2. My overall plan is to set up a small server at home that I can use as a mass storage (just waiting for a RAID rack to be put in ewaste) and a plex/media server.
3. What equipment will be needed to set up an at home server - Ive only got a single 2800 at the moment but more stuff will appear in the ewaste.
4. What can I do with a single router? (i dont have any interface cards to install yet) or is that all you need to make a small media/storage server?
5. Any instructions that i can read that is designed for a network noob. - Im slowly picking up more knowledge from work.

As I stated in the title - I really need a stepping stone first since all information I find assumes you already know stuff.

 

[evermorex76]

Kind of a big ask, IMO. A forum post isn't where you go to get training from scratch on a wide range of topics. There's simply too much to fit into a post (or do for free) to walk you through from the ground up to having an entire functional network with servers and applications, and anything done this way would be very specific to this one setup rather than actually teaching you the ways and reasons for it all. (Giving a man a fish instead of teaching him to fish. Or teaching him to fish with one specific type of fishing rod and bait that works in one type of water and nothing about how to fish anywhere else.)

Obtain study guides for Cisco certifications (CCENT is the lowest now). Even if you don't take the test, this will give you a foundation in networking and can guide you further in what you might want to learn. (And actually testing and getting certified gives you more value to the company and opportunities for growth and promotion and increased pay, or being able to take the skills you've learned to another company at some point.) You might need to progress to guides for higher levels to do much more than a basic setup. CCENT didn't exist when I got certified as CCNA (which was a single cert at the time that then became two that then became one again; it was a while ago), so I have no real idea of what's on it. You could also look at the Network+ study guides which doesn't focus on a single brand but also doesn't teach you about Cisco equipment; it's generic network technology and design.

I got my start in networking through on-the-job training, too, with zero experience with anything other than dial-up networking, and went straight into enterprise stuff like T1s, T3s, business DSL, cable systems, ISP backbone networks. I think it's a great way to learn, but to a large degree when you're starting from nothing you need specific targets and goals and tasks from which you branch out and learn. Trying to set your OWN goals and tasks is not very effective because you don't know what's possible yet in order to aim for learning how to do those things. It takes time to get a base level and I don't think you've reached that if you didn't even know how to console to the device.

Is the company actually letting you take home the old equipment to keep? That could be a tax issue or something like that, if they're writing off depreciated values or something or recording them destroyed, or they could have some tax liability on you for their value. I know it happens all the time without issues, just pointing out it COULD be an issue.

 

[willeatpants]

That actually helps alot. I googled that CCNA cert and found what I was looking for. Cheers

 

[bill001g]

You do not even need a router of any kind to do what you want. You pretty much just need a very dumb switch so you get maximum transfer rates between your devices. All the real functionality you talk about is being done on the servers.

A consumer router likely will actually be faster than a cisco commercial router. The 4 lan ports on a consumer router are actually a small switch. The port on a cisco router...unless you buy a switch card... pass though the router cpu. This can at times bottleneck the traffic. A switch uses special dedicated asic chips and can run all ports at maximimum rate in and out at the same time. So a 4 port gigabit switch can pass 8 gbits of data. Router ports do not even come close to the bandwidth total.

Next the "router" funcationaliy is only used when you must choose between multiple paths for data to take. For example you have backup connections. It is unlikely you have mulitple routers inside your house not like you are going to setup different rooms in your house on differnt networks with different connections between them.

The last function a "router" does is NAT. This is really the only reason the vast majority of people have a router in their house. This is used to share the single public IP you get from your ISP with your internal machines. This really is not the primary function of a cisco commercial router. It can do it but in many cases consumer routers can run faster. Consumer routers have a speical asic chip that does the NAT function. Some cisco routers designed for small business have this but most use the CPU chip to do this function. Like the switching function dedicated hardware is much faster than using CPU.

The only real use of old cisco commerical equipment is to use it to study for certifications so you can get a job in the networking area. This is a fairly narrow field. It is only used by extremely large enterprise type business that have many locations/buildings that need to communicate. Problem is a lot of this function, like almost all of IT, has been outsourcecd to the large ISP. There is demand for networking professionals in ISP.

To do anything useful you really need say 5 to 10 routers. You would be learning about actual routing protocols like OSPF or BGP or other advanced networks like MPLS. Although it was common many years ago when I got CCIE to use actual hardware nowdays everythings is done with a bunch or simulated routers running in virtual machines. The only time you need actual routers to learn on is when you are using some of the very specialized interface cards.

 

[cruisetung]

I did take some CCNA courses years ago, but it's too hard for me from the beginning, so I took probably just 3 courses and quit very soon. I handled company's networking (over 60 PCs) then and found it's completely unnecessary.

Cisco's stuff is only needed inside an enterprise. Or if you want to learn complex network routing and make it you career.

There is a free emulator called GNS3 that can emulate some Cisco switches (https://gns3.com/marketplace/appliances) in a virtual machine, but I never tried it myself. I believe there are many tutorials on Youtube though.

Grok's answer:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg==_8434f00b-7ba4-4a3d-95ff-0d2498aae25c

For home users, all you need probably is just VLANs. There are tons of tutorials on Youtube too.

In the past, you can only create VLANs using cisco switches with CLI commands. Nowadays, all you need is just a cheap and power efficient smart switch with it's built-in web GUI, you don't need bulky, noisy and power hungry Cisco switches anymore.

 

[evermorex76]

Cisco does make small-business switches that have a web GUI and no CLI, so you get the good quality and support at a reasonable price. They obviously don't have the level of performance as the higher end models that use a CLI. They can be useful for learning the underlying, non-brand-specific networking stuff. But learning the Cisco stuff does give you that certification option and a beginning to the path of certifications that can land a high-paying job, and if the company is working with Cisco primarily then it's obviously useful.

With some on-the-job learning (I forget how long), which included higher-level coworkers who were happy to help train an eager learner, and then reading the CCNA study guide (which is admittedly obtuse and dense), I was able to pass the test with a pretty good score. The CCENT ought to be even easier and could maybe be done with just reading the study guide since it is intended as the first level. I personally find it easy to pick all that stuff up and love learning, so I can't really say or imagine how other people might do with it.