The Community Lab is One Year Old!

I'm happy to announce that the community lab turned one today! On November 14th last year, the lab was officially opened to the community for free use. My loving wife baked a cake for the occasion.

In its first year of operation, the lab has seen over six thousand reservations and several hardware additions. It has also served as a huge learning exercise for me.

How the lab has grown

User donations have enabled the lab to expand a bit from its initial offering. Monetary donations funded the purchase of a Catalyst 3560-24 to replace one of the Catalyst 3550s, which was soon matched by the extremely generous donation of a second 3560 from one individual who wishes to remain anonymous. The lab also acquired a handful of Cisco IP phones thanks to a donation.

Just recently the lab also welcomed its second corporate sponsor, Force10 Networks, who sponsored one of their S25N GigabitEthernet switches. As of this weekend, the S25N is available for reservation in the lab under device block C.

Lessons learned

Popularity. Free Cisco labs become very popular very quickly. The current average wait time for a lab reservation is between one and two weeks.

Damage Control. While it is definitely necessary to implement some safeguards to prevent people from accidentally deleting software images on devices, this hasn't been as big an issue as I anticipated (knock on wood).

Abuse. Sadly, some people will abuse a free service. The lab's biggest problem right now is that greedy individuals attempt to create multiple reservations under false user accounts, hogging as much lab time as they can for themselves. I've even caught people attempting to sell lab time to others. I have a zero-tolerance policy for any of this, and to date have blocked over 50 IP prefixes, totaling roughly 2.3 million individual addresses, from accessing the lab.

What's next for the lab?

I have three major goals for the lab now. First, I would like to get a few more devices from other vendors in the lab. Unfortunately, I am limited with regard to how much gear I can host in the lab, so I have to be selective.

Second, I've been pondering setting up a server dedicated to the lab, which could host virtual machines to fulfill a variety of roles, including:

• An NMS (SolarWinds has offered to sponsor a license for Orion NPM)
• A WAN emulator (e.g. WANem)
• An FTP/TFTP/SCP server for loading and saving device configurations
• Arista vEOS
• Dynamips instances to simulate "backbone" routers which inject external routes
• General end host functionality for connectivity testing
• Probably other stuff I haven't thought of yet (ideas welcome)

Lastly, I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a robust solution for the abuse problem. Blacklisting IP prefixes is moderately effective (especially since they are blocked from accessing the lab itself, not just the reservation system), but punishes many potentially honest users for the actions of a few miscreants. Unfortunately I haven't been able to come up with any better solutions. If you have an idea feel free to leave a comment, or if you prefer, contact me directly.

Thank you!

I want to close this post by acknowledging all of the people who have helped make the lab better, whether through donations, sponsoring equipment, feedback, or simply helping to spread the word. Thank you!