I’ve been doing labs out of the BSCI lab portfolio. I’m working on lab 2-4, an EIGRP over frame relay lab. Back when I had been studying for my CCNA, I did routing labs with 9 routers. It was total overkill for the CCNA, but it served the dual purpose of seeing what I could get away with on dynamips, as I wanted to see how suitable it would be for CCIE-level networks. Ya, you can always build a second PC to run it on, but I didn’t really want to. Anyway, the point is, I got it working in a 9 router lab, albeit with 3 instances of dynamips running at the same time. For reference, I have a Q9450 cpu and 4GB of ram.
Today I was trying to configure a 4 router lab, with 1 router acting as a frame relay switch. I set it up in one instance, but a serial interface on my Frame relay switch kept flapping. I then tried splitting the switch off into its own instance. Same problem. Then I split the devices evenly between two instances and restarted my computer… Same problem. I was starting to get a little pissed, as i’d wasted 30 minutse on this. You should know i was trying to do this with 2611XM routers and a 12.4T AdvSec ios. Well, it seems that was the problem. By changing the FR switch to use a 7200 router and a 12.4T AdvEnt Ios, it stopped flapping and all of a sudden my eigrp routes showed up like they were supposed to. FWIW I’m still using the 2611XM for R1->3. I’m just using the 7200 for the frame relay switch. An hour later I can finally get on with the lab….
