At my present employer we're a heavy-duty Cisco shop. We have an environment large enough to support several remote offices and easily a thousand or more employees. Our network engineer built the operation with multiple redundancies following most of the Cisco best practices. The problem though is that we no longer have a dedicated Cisco engineer on staff and we've reduced the number of offices and employees so the sophistication is big-time overkill for our present size and needs. If we change locations I'll re-design the network but in the mean time there's not much point in changing anything unless something breaks. However there are some changes we might need to make (i.e., routing external RDP traffic to a Terminal Server box) and instead of calling in a consultant I'm delving into the Cisco routers. My experience with the Cisco products is limited but I've worked quite a bit with various Linux-based routing, both software and embedded Linux routers and firewalls. While the concepts are similar there are the requisite idiosyncrasies specific to each brand and operating system.
With that said, I am in the process of training myself on the Cisco IOS this week. While self-training may not be a suitable alternative to classroom formalized training for everyone, it should be enough to help me find my way around the Cisco gear a little more effectively.
To train myself I've installed a simulator on my Mac that's built for Linux. To do so, I needed to download the following:
Apple's Xcode 3.0 Developer Kit (lots of compilers and cool SDK stuff)
The Cisco 7200 Simulator
The libpcap compiler
I also used this reference to help me get the bits installed
My biggest thing has been to familiarize myself with the commands and utilities to get around and so far this has worked great.
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