Stubby Post - Packetlife's Community Lab

I’m way behind in talking about this, but Jeremy Stretch over at Packetlife.net has a community lab that is free to use.  This is a great resource for those of us who are too poor to have their own physical devices for Cisco studies.  All you need is an account on the site and a sense of community.

There are two labs to reserve, and each contains a firewall, routers, and switches.  This is plenty of stuff to get your feet wet with the gear, let you research some functionality that Cisco promised is great, and to lab out something you’re looking to implement.  The lab is offered for free, but Jeremy is giving his time and money for this lab.  I think it would be a great idea to drop a few dollars to him via his donate link if you use his stuff.   If you’re a regular user and don’t donate, I ask that you do a moral inventory on yourself so you might see just how bad you are being.

As a note of my own personal moral inventory, I must say that I don’t mention Jeremy’s site nearly enough.  Jeremy has done so much for the networking community at large and has asked for nothing in return.  Besides the lab, there are forums to troll, a wiki to update, and posters to buy.  Jeremy has a large repository of packet captures and very high-quality cheat sheets to download and analyze, too.  He’s also got the all-important list of tools that every network guru needs to have in the arsenal.  In other words, he’s got way more stuff than I could ever dream of contributing to my fellow network dud(ett)es.  Picture me in front of a bunch of homeless puppies (for dramatic effect) as I ask everyone to head over to packetlife.net and contribute however you can.

Send any honeymoon pranks questions my way.