Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Fun with a Cisco 871W Router

I picked up a Cisco 871W Router to play with and I have to admit that I am very impressed with this little (very quiet - no fan) router from Cisco. It has a single F4 FastEthernet port that is run as a routed interface and then it has 4 FastEthernet ports that can act as switchports for access, trunk or any combination you want to do along with irb, Etherchannels and the regular vlan configurations you expect. In addition, I can run cbac, ipv6, nbar, QoS, ospf (v2 and v3), bgp, eigrp and rip (v1 and v2) on this thing. To top it all off, it has a wireless interface built in that can act as a bridge, a standard AP and is completely customizable in terms of authentication and access rules.
I am starting to set up my own internal lab with several of these just to practice some routing and wireless configurations. I am also using them as the basis of my IPv6 labs for the Windows Vista hands on labs. So far they have been great!
- Ed

No comments: