Four Important Commands For Your CCNA - CCNP Home Lab

More CCNA and CCNP candidates than ever before are putting together their own home practice labs. It's more affordable than it ever has been, and I receive emails daily from new CCNAs and CCNPs who say it's the best thing they could have done to improve their studies.

There are some commands you can configure on your lab routers that won't necessarily be on your CCNA or CCNP exams, but they will make life a lot easier for you. Let's take a look at just a few of these.

The command "no exec" is short, yet powerful. Occasionally you'll have what is referred to as a "rogue EXEC" process tie up a line, and you end up having to continually clear lines, which disrupts your practice. If you have an access server, I highly recommend you configure this command on your lines, as shown here:

ACCESS_SERVER(con)#line 1 8

ACCESS_SERVER(con)#no exec

From your CCNA studies, you know that the command "no ip domain-lookup" prevents a Cisco router from sending a broadcast to find a DNS server anytime you enter something that is not an IOS command - and that includes mistyped commands, which happens to all of us sooner or later. Make sure to run that command in global configuration mode on all your practice routers.

There are two commands I like to configure on the console line on all my practice routers and switches. The first is "exec-timeout 0 0", which prevents you from being kicked out of enable mode and back into user exec after a few minutes of inactivity. (This doesn't sound like much, but you'll get pretty tired of typing "enable" after a while.) The first zero refers to minutes, the second zero to seconds. Setting them both to zero disables the exec-timeout function.

The second command prevents the router from interrupting the command you're typing with a console message. If you've ever been in the middle of typing a router command and suddenly you're interrupted with a logging message, you know that can be pretty annoying. We don't want the router to not display the message, but we do want the router to wait until we're done entering data. The command to perform this is "logging synchronous".

R1(config)#line console 0

R1(config-line)#exec-timeout 0 0

R1(config-line)#logging synchronous

You won't see many of these commands on your exams, but after you configure them on your home lab devices, you'll wonder how you did without them!

NEW BREED OF SCAVENGER HUNTS ONLINE

Madison Heights, Michigan, July 17, 2007 – Scavenger hunts are no longer a fully corporeal affair.

One can simply sit down in front of the computer and follow clues to bountiful rewards.

Less than three months out from the launch of eScavenger.com, over $20,000 in prizes have been awarded, ranging from big screen televisions, to Nintendo Wiis, and Apple iPods. With online scavenger hunts currently hosted twice a week, members join free of charge and compete with others across the nation. In addition to grand prizes for the hunts, called "Adventures", users who make it through to the end are awarded Doubloons, which are stored in their account and can be traded in for more coveted treasures.

The response from the public has been extremely positive. "(I) love the site, love the competition, compete whenever I can," a user responded in a recent survey administered by the eScavengers team. In the short time since its release, eScavengers.com has broken down traffic barriers and now boasts over 6.6 million hits and 102,000 unique visitors.

The web site, still in Beta phase, will soon be entering into its highly anticipated version 3.0, to include a batch of upgrades, many of which were suggested by users. "Recently we implemented an automated reminder system and referral bonus system, both of which were requested by users," explains Zac Ball, co-creator of eScavengers. "Although we are deep into the development stages of the new release, we are still accepting feedback from users. Their opinions are very valuable, and we are striving to make everyone happy." The speculative date for the release of version 3.0 is the end of August, 2007.