In 1998 I owned an ISP in the Washington DC area, and the business had grown to the point that I needed to expand my network to support all the users. I bought a Cisco 2524 router for the T1 data connection, and attended an Introduction to Cisco Router Configuration class. Until December 1999 when we moved to Alaska, I continued to work with Cisco routers at work. But from 12/99 until now, I haven't even touched one.
Well about a week ago just out of curiosity I did a search on Ebay for Cisco 2524 routers... WOW! I paid about $1700 for the router I bought for the ISP, and today you can pick up an identical router for about $25. Well, $25 is what I paid for the first one... the second one I got for $15! And finally I picked up a 2514 that has been fully upgraded, and it was still under $100.
So, what could I possibly need with 3 Cisco routers? Well, I had started studying for my CCNA certification before we moved to Alaska, and since I would like to get back into a real IT job versus having all the IT responsibilies as a collateral duty, I thought I'd start studying again. Cisco certifications are a real plus if you're looking for a job as a network engineer, and while I've had training, and have quite a bit of experience with them... I am out of date. So this will catch me up with the changes made to their software in the last 6 years, and I'll have some fun playing with my routers in the process.
The 2514 router can even be used on my home network for connecting my DSL to the local LAN. Currently I have a D-Link DI-604 broadband router, and while it does the job very handily, it has some real annoying limitations. With all of the different services I run on our server I have to configure the router to let outside connections in to the server, but the 604 only allows about 20 of these configurations. So I've had to get creative with which ports are open, and delete a number of them that aren't strictly necessary. The Cisco routers would not have this limitation, so would allow me much more flexibility.
Well that's about all for now, I've received the first router already and begun playing with it... it was shipped with all the passwords still in place, so right from the start I was tested to see if I could still complete a password recovery. With that out of the way it is installed on my network and I'm having fun poking around under the hood again.
