Using course resources

- Sprinkled throughout this course, you're going to have access to lab exercises. And these lab exercises are going to be done using Cisco's network emulator called CML for Cisco Modeling Labs. And there are a couple of options for getting your hands on Cisco Modeling Labs. One option, the option I primarily use, is you can pay $199 a year for a license to run CML software on your local machine. And the price might change by the time you watch this video, but currently, it's $199. Another option to get CML, is to go out to Cisco's DevNet sandbox, where they've made CML available to you for free. And what you can do is reserve as much as a four hour block of time, during which time you can load up a topology and do a lab. And then you can reserve another four hour block of time if you want to do that. And in this video, I want to show you how we can go out to Cisco's DevNet sandbox, make a reservation and get access to that CML resource. And I'll also show you CML running on my local machine. By the way, they're going to look identical. And regardless of which platform you're using, the DevNet sandbox or your local machine, it's going to work the same. You're going to be importing a configuration file, we've got these pre-configured topologies as your lab exercises in this course, and I'll show you how we can import a file into CML, how we can connect to the different devices in that topology, and then we can start doing our troubleshooting or our configuration exercises. I think you're going to really enjoy working with CML. But let's begin this video by going out to Cisco's DevNet sandbox and taking a look at how to get free access to CML. I'm sitting over at the Cisco DevNet sandbox now. And the way you can get here, I've created a shortcut for you, you can go to kwtrain.com/sandbox, and you'll be prompted to login. And if you don't have a login, you can create a free login. But once you get logged in, you're going to see a screen much like this. And I say much like this because the fantastic folks over at Cisco DevNet, they're continually iterating and adding things to what's available in the sandbox. So this might look a bit different when you watch it, but what I want to do, is I want to search for Cisco Modeling Labs. Now at the time of this recording, they have both CML personal and enterprise versions available, I just want to use the personal version. So in my browser, I'm going to do a find, and I'm going to look for the word modeling. And I find this lab that says Cisco Modeling Labs, and I need to reserve it. So let's say I want to reserve it. And we can reserve it for up to four hours at a time, notice it's two hours by default. But I can change that if I want to, and I can bump that up to as long as four hours. Notice that is the maximum, and I'm going to start right now. So let's say reserve. And it's going to take a bit of time to do the reservation, but we have some work to do while everything is being set up. Notice we're in setup mode right now, and we're told that it could take about 10 minutes or so to get everything set up. One thing we need to do, is to get secure access into the sandbox. In other words VPN access. If you go to the VPN access tab, notice that there is a link to download Cisco's AnyConnect VPN client software. If you don't have that, you'll want to go ahead and download that. And there are instructions for getting it set up on your particular operating system. I'm personally running on Mac OS, and I've already got Cisco AnyConnect set up, and I'm going to be either emailed my credentials, or if you didn't say you want to get emailed your credentials when the lab is set up, you can click on this output button up at the top, which is what I typically do so I don't have to bounce over to my email. I'll click on output, and once it has everything set up and it has my credentials ready, they'll be listed here. And then I'll open up my Cisco AnyConnect VPN software and using those credentials, I'll get logged in. And this is going to take a few more minutes. Right now it's estimating eight minutes to completion. So after this is setup, and after my credentials are displayed here in this window, I'm going to resume the video and then we're going to connect using the AnyConnect software. I'll see you back in a moment as soon as this setup is complete. Well good news, the setup has completed so we're ready to connect. And I'm given my username and password. And if we scroll down just a bit, we'll see our access credentials. I'm going to copy the VPN network name, bring up our AnyConnect software, we'll say that is our destination. We want to connect for the password, I'll type that in. Say OK. And we are connected, excellent. Now, in order to get to the CML screen, I can go to this link, so click on that, it's going to open up in a separate browser tab. And what is my username? My username is developer, I'll copy and paste that. And my password is Cisco12345. With some creative capitalization and numbering. I'll paste that in. And it'll say login. And just like that, we're in Cisco Modeling Labs. And they give us a lab by default that we can play with, pretty nice topology. And if you want to see details of that topology, just scroll down here and here is that topology. But the point of this video, is to show you how to import a topology file that we've made for you as part of this course. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go to lab manager and I'm going to turn this off. It's taking up 14 of my 20 nodes right now. So I'm going to say stop lab, and we'll see this number 14, count all the way down, and we won't have anything started. And now that we've seen how to get into CML using the Cisco DevNet sandbox for free, let me take you over to my machine. And I'm going to show you how to import a topology file. And by the way, the specific topology file that I'll be using in this demo, it's for an OSPF lab, and you're going to have access to that lab in part two of this NRC video course here on LinkedIn Learning. And I thought I would do the rest of the video on my machine, that way, we don't have any time constraints. So let's go over to my machine, and you'll notice that it looks pretty much the same. And depending on what portal you're using to get to these videos, there might be a downloads section on a lab page, where you can download the zip file containing the YAML file, or the course might have a resources folder that you can dig into and find it there. But I've got a folder on my hard drive set aside to drop in some of these topology files. And let's import one and get connected. I'm going to say, import lab, and we can browse. And notice that we can download these as .zip files, and then we expand them and they turn into .yaml files, which stands for YAML Ain't Markup Language. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense, but I promise that's really what YAML stands for, YAML Ain't Markup Language. Interesting. But I'm going to import this OSPF troubleshooting YAML file, and we say upload topology, and then we click on go to lab, and here it is. If I want to start it, I'll go under simulate, and I'll say start lab, and you'll see that there will be green dots that will appear after these devices are up and going. Now I've got a couple of unmanaged switches, but we're really focused on these three middle routers right here. And you can see a little symbol now showing that it's loading. While it's loading, let me show you how we can connect to the console of these devices. Let's go over to a terminal emulator. And you might have a terminal emulator of your choice. I'm running on Mac OS, so I'm just using the terminal app that comes with Mac OS, which gives me a tabbed interface if I wanted. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to secure shell to the IP address of my CML virtual machine that I've installed locally on my machine. And the username I configured was admin. And at Cisco DevNet sandbox, they'll give you the username and password there. But I'm going to do a secure shell wanting to log in as admin to my virtual machine, and I'll give the password. And we're sitting at the console server. Now I can do a list from here and I can see what devices are available. And I'm not really interested in this lab, in connecting to the switches, I want to connect to these routers, R1, R2 and R3. And notice that we've got three identifiers for device, there's the lab ID, and everybody within a topology has the same lab ID, and then there's the node ID, that's the identifier of a node within the topology. And then we have lines. Oftentimes there'll be zero and one. Zero for the console port and one for the auxiliary port. So some of our devices don't have auxiliary ports, and you might just see a zero here. But if I want to connect to R1, I'm going to say open/, and I'm going to copy and paste the lab ID, give another /. So I've given the lab ID now give the node ID. The node ID for R1 is n2, node two, / and then I'll give a zero for the console line. And we're connected. And notice that this router has booted up now, it's already configured as R1 if I do a show run, you'll see that it has an existing configuration. Now this particular lab I loaded up is a troubleshooting lab. So the issues that you need to solve, they've already been injected into these different devices. And if I want to open up another tab, again, your terminal emulator may vary, but I'm going to say give me a new tab, and I'll have another tab for R2. And again, I'll say open give the lab ID. This time I'll go to node three console port, and I'm on R2 and I could do the same thing for R3, but that's the way that I prefer to go about it. However, there is a terminal that you can use from within the CML management screen. We could click on one of these devices, and I could say console. And I could say open console. We can resize this just a bit. And this would also get me to that console. Personal preference, I prefer to use my own terminal emulator that I'm already used to, that I can set up tabbed interfaces on. Now the current version of CML as I'm recording this, does not support tabbed interfaces. I've heard that a future version is going to support tabbed interfaces in this console view. So that's going to make it a lot better when that's available. And it may be available when you're watching this video. But for now, I'm going to stick to using my own terminal application. And that's a look at how we can get access to Cisco Modeling Labs either on our own machine or in the Cisco DevNet sandbox, how we can import one of these .yaml files that we extract from a zip file that you download in your course, how we can boot up that topology and then connect to the console port of our different devices. Now I really hope you enjoy the lab exercises in this course. Now let's get started.