Free Play Labs – CCNA Vol 2, Chapter 9

What’s in This Post

Chapter Intro: A brief description of the topics in that chapter of the book.

Download Link: Links to a ZIP; the ZIP holds all the .PKT files for this chapter.

Table of PKT files, by Example: A table that lists each example in the chapter, with the files supplied for each. Also lists a note about whether the PKT topology matches the book example exactly or not.

Tips: When we build the files, we come across items that we think might confuse you when trying the examples with PT. We write those notes in this section!

Chapter Intro

Let’s examine Chapter 9 of the CCNA 200-301 Cert Guide, Vol 2 as three separate topics, per the three major sections in the chapter:

• Syslog
• NTP
• CDP & LLDP

Syslog

We tested in PT 7.3 vs the flow used in the book examples and eventually decided it was not worth trying to re-create the examples. The book covers the basics, as you might expect, but from a command perspective, that section covers many command options. You can read the examples as usual and learn a lot from those.

You can still learn about logging and Syslog using Cisco PT. We added notes in the per-Example notes below in this post pointing out command issues that we found. That said, you should still be able to try some of the logging features in PT. However, if you have access to any real gear, this is definitely a topic you should instead practice on real.

NTP

NTP works well enough with PT so you can re-create many of the examples. The per-example accordion notes below give some insight into the known issues. But you can definitely learn some details about NTP.

That said, you may get frustrated waiting for NTP to converge unless you take extra care. NTP converges more slowly in NTP than in real gear. To aid that process, try this:

Type these two commands on the two devices on which you want the time to converge – but do not press enter. Just leave the command on the command line:

• clock set 12:00:00 Jul 20 2020
• clock set 12:00:01 Jul 20 2020

Note that the time is 1 second off.

Get ready to issue the first command on that device, and within 1 second, switch to the second device and press enter. The goal: Press enter on the 2nd command at about 1 second after you pressed enter on the first command.

Following this process, you will manually set the time to close to the same time. Then NTP inside PT can do the rest without waiting 15-30 minutes.

CDP & LLDP

CDP and LLDP discover details about neighboring devices. The very function of CDP and LLDP poses challenges when comparing what PT can do in comparison to real gear. But both CDP and LLDP work well enough for you to re-create many of the examples from the book. Of note:

We see some differences in command support based on the PT device models, particularly with LLDP and switches. We used 2960 switches for the supplied PT files because those give the best LLDP support in PT. Unfortunately, that prevents the interfaces used in PT from matching the interfaces used in the book examples, but we still think you can learn from re-creating the book examples.

Also, we suggest that you use PT to get a general idea of what you see with CDP and LLDP, but avoid trying to make a list of specific rules and expectations based on the output in PT. For example, the output will guide you through the idea of learning a neighbor’s hostname, the interface used by the neighbor, and the local device’s interface. So using these tools to verify a network diagram can be a good exercise using PT.

Download the Packet Tracer ZIP File

One .PKT File – But Maybe Two (Duplicate) Toplogies

When building the content for this post, we review the examples in the book and decide whether it makes sense to supply a Packet Tracer (.pkt) file to match the example. If we choose to support an example by supplying a matching .pkt file, the .pkt file includes a topology that matches the example as much as possible. It also includes the device configurations as they should exist at the beginning of the example.

In some cases, the .pkt file shows two instances of the lab topology – one above and one below. We include two such topologies when the book example includes configuration commands, for these purposes:

• Top/Initial: The topology at the top has the configuration state at the beginning of the example.
• Bottom/Ending: The topology at the bottom adds the configuration per the example, so that it mimics the configuration at the end of the example.

Table of .PKT Files, by Example