IOS:Open Source Lab DNS and IP Addressing

A num­ber of Cisco Bloggers have talked about mak­ing labs avail­able for oth­ers to use. However, part of what will be needed is some con­ven­tions to make these labs work for the largest num­ber of people.

Following Ivan Pepelnjak post­ing on Private Domain Names, and an earlier post­ing that I made on Reserved IP Address for Testing I believe we have per­fect com­bin­a­tion for DNS and IP addresses for build­ing live test envir­on­ments, that will work for Open Source lab scenarios.

Reserved Domain Names

From RFC2606 on Reserved Domain Names:

To safely sat­isfy these needs, four domain names are reserved as lis­ted and described below.

.test
.example
.invalid
.localhost

“.test” is recom­men­ded for use in test­ing of cur­rent or new DNS related code.

“.example” is recom­men­ded for use in doc­u­ment­a­tion or as examples.

IP Range Allocated for Testing

From RFC3330:
198.18.0.0/15 — This block has been alloc­ated for use in bench­mark tests of net­work inter­con­nect devices. Its use is doc­u­mented in [RFC 2544].

Use in LAB networks

When I build a test net­work in a Corporate Networks, I am look­ing for an Address range that will never have an impact on the live sys­tem. And if some sort of con­fig­ur­a­tion acci­dent occurs where traffic is intro­duced into the cor­por­ate sys­tem, I need to be able to clearly identify where this traffic is com­ing from. Unique IP addresses is a solu­tion to this.

The use of a DNS nam­ing con­ven­tion that clearly iden­ti­fies test traffic, and also the use of clearly defined range for test IP addresses. The use of .test exten­sions would allow for the cre­ation of the a DNS range that is unique to a test envir­on­ment, and be read­ily identified.

Widespread Use

So here is a request to every­one, if you plan to write a lab or develop a test­ing plan or pub­lish a con­fig­ur­a­tion, con­sider using these DNS names and IP addresses. This could pro­duce some con­sist­ency in our lab scen­arios, and make them port­able into our cor­por­ate test envir­on­ments, if you like, a first step to an open source look at net­work labs.

Please leave com­ments below to show sup­port either for or against. If there is suf­fi­cient interest, I have a forum pre­pared for bet­ter dis­cus­sion. I look for­ward to hear­ing from you.

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