I am fortuante enough to have the equipment available to duplicate the lab topology used in the CCNA videos. I made some minor changes to hardware to fit what I had.
As far as the routers go, R1 is a 2514, R2, R3, & R4 are all 2520, R5 & R6 are 1721s, and I also have another 2520 acting as a Frame Relay Switch.
The lab in the videos utilize three 3550 L3 switches, but I opted to use (1) 3550 for SW1 and (2) 2950 for SW2 and SW3.
R6 was added, solely to simulate other WAN connections besides Frame Relay. R5 and R6 came with one FastEthernet port and built-in VPN cards. I added two WIC cards to them, one to add a 10MB ethernet port, and the other card to add a serial port.
With all that said, I have been studying remotely during my lunch hours. I have a web-powered ethernet switch that I log into to fire-up the rack, and then shut it down when I'm finished. Telnet was always the mode of choice, but the more I read about it, Telnet is not as secure as one would like it to be.
I would like some guidance on how to configure this properly, so I could SSH into the rack when need be. Maybe there would be a way to utilize one of the 1721 routers.
Currently, I have a Linksys WRT160Nv2 Wifi Router which the Cisco Access Server is connected to. I'm using the firewall built into the Linksys, along with Norton on the computer. I also have a PIX 501, which is not currently connected, and I'm not quite sure how to implement that yet.
I know there is a lot here, but maybe we can work through this little by little.
Thank you!
Chris