Gambit Communications' Mimic Virtual Lab CCNA

Browser AccessThe heart of MVL is a Cisco IOS and SNMP simulator. The tutorials sharpen your networking chops through telnet and an SNMP MIB browser. You interact with the router and switch operating system and see the results of your traffic-engineering tweaks in the SNMP MIB values.

The tutorials' descriptive names--like "Configure eBGP mode BGP routing"--make it easy to know where to start. For the IOS-challenged, there's even an exercise on basic IOS commands.

Ready, Set ...

I used the guided tutorial to learn the basic functionality of MVL, set IP addresses and check that my system would support the new product. The 12-MB download self-extracts and offers up a hostid for licensing. The lab simulates switches and routers that communicate with actual stacks. I had a problem at first, but MVL pointed me to a start-up log that listed a load error. The log gave me details about the problem and then let me execute a reboot.

I tried to set up a default route, and I was instructed to show the IP route. Before I did so, however, I wanted to see how much support for other IOS commands the simulator provides, because I had seen network simulators that support only a narrow subset of commands. This is not the case with MLV. The simulator doesn't support every command, but it is comprehensive in what it does support. For example, "sh ip ?" listed all the options, including arp, int, OSPF, RIP and NAT, and I could actually execute these commands and receive accurate responses.For more complex network simulations, MVL lets you choose between automatic and manual network setup. A complete set of network auditing commands is also provided.

I'd like to see Gambit add a "back" option so if you do something incorrectly, like type the wrong mask for a route, and realize your mistake before getting to the end, you can go back and fix it. As things stand now, you can go back and check your work only after a diagnostic ping fails.

Bruce Boardman, executive editor of Network Computing, tests and writes about network and systems management. Write to him at [email protected].