Jeremy Stretch has done a fantastic job at hosting a free community lab. I have always admired that. In that same spirit of providing something of value to the community at no charge I have secured a fair amount of Cisco Devices and have the pleasure of announcing that in February of 2011, GlobalConfig.net will also have a “Community Lab.”

How is This Possible?

My employer, Ascolta Training, has agreed to allocate equipment that is not in use as well as bandwidth for learner access. What this means is that I can easily have the lab up and running, actually sooner than February. I will release the labs publicly as soon as I have tested it. Since Ascolta already provides remote lab access for students this should be pretty simple to do, but I’d like to be sure that we will have as few issues as possible.

Lab Setup:

The console server will be an opengear server. You’ll notice a nice banner that links back to them on the site now. The labs will be accessible via telnet as well as Remote Desktop for certain tasks. This is typically how we access the ACS server of the CUCM interface in the courses that I teach so rather than reinvent the wheel I figured I would simply stick with what I know. Additionally there iwll be a VPN concentrator for access in to the labs for testing with CUCM and such.

Call for Assistance

I also need to develop/purchase a calendar/scheduling system that can be used to block-out your time slots when your register. If anyone wants to donate their time to developing this system, which needs to sit on top of wordpress and can authenticate back to LDAP or RADIUS I am more than willing to accept. If you think you already know of a solution please let me know.

What to look for:

Conclusion

I hope this provides some value for you. I did not come up with this idea- It was that of Jeremy Stretch at Packetlife.net. While you’re waiting on the Globalconfig.net Community Lab to be released be sure to head over to Packetlife.net and browse the wealth of information that Jeremy has provided.