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In this tutorial, you will learn a couple ways to connect a physical router to your home phone line as part of your “virtual voice lab “.  An all virtual voice lab would be ideal. However, real hardware is necessary for a more complete voice lab. I will be using a 2611XM for my home lab, but you can use just about any Cisco router with a couple fxs and fxo ports.

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Here at Blindhog.net, we have issued tutorials for connecting Windows or Linux to a physical network using gns3, but apparently, there is a little difference for MacOSX.  I recently received an email from one of our readers, Ivan Pletenev. Ivan describes how to connect GNS3 to internet through wifi-interface in MacOSX. You will find his writeup below. Thanks Ivan!

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I apologize for the delay in posting the next tutorial in the virtual voice lab but I ran into a problem communicating from the HQ router to the host Ubuntu server. I thought I was able to communicate from the HQ router to the host during the Headquarters build tutorial….but I was wrong.

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This is the Frame-Relay WAN section of the Virtual Voice Lab. In this tutorial, you will learn how to connect Branch 1 and Branch 2 routers to the Headquarters router using frame-relay PVCs.
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Is it possible to build a voice lab without actual hardware? The answer is yes and no. You can build a very good lab using GNS3 and VMWare but it is not possible to build a complete lab. The underlying emulation engine for GNS3 (dynamips) does not support digital signal processors (dsps) or voice cards.

Over the next few months, I will show you how to build a very good lab without any hardware. If you want a more complete lab, you will need to obtain at least one router with dsps and voice cards. I have a 2611XM router with DSPs, a vic-2fxs card, a vic-2fxo card and an ATA-186.

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I was browsing videos on brainbump.net last Friday and noticed a different take on a tutorial I did regarding automatic configuration backups with the ‘archive’ command.  While watching the video, I learned a new trick.  The file name in the ‘path’ command may contain two different variables.

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This is part two of my gns3 switching tutorial series. In part 1, you learned how to use a 16 port network module (NM-16ESW) to simulate many features of a Cisco switch. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure vlans on the switch and how to route between vlans with a ‘router on a stick’ configuration.

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In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a Cisco switching lab … even though GNS3 cannot emulate a Cisco switch. I will show you how to use an NM-16ESW network module in a 3640 router to emulate a switching environment.

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If you have used GNS3 for any amount of time at all, you have encountered this situation. It’s late and you have been working on your lastest lab for hours. You decide to save your work. Logically, you go to File > Save. Unfortunately, the topology is saved but the router configs are gone.

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Do you get annoyed by Operating systems asking you if you are sure you want to perform an action 10 times before it will actually do what you want?

If so, you probably also get annoyed when your router gives you the old “Destination filename [startup-config]?” after you issue the “copy run start” command. Using the ‘file prompt quiet’ command will keep your router quiet.

Not only does this command stop annoyances, it is also the command you need to use if need to use file operations (copy, write, etc) with a kron job. I ran into a situation where a router configuration needed to be automatically backed up in two locations. I used the ‘archive‘ configuration to backup to an scp server and a kron job to backup to an ftp server. Without the ‘file prompt quiet’ command, the kron job fails.

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