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.
Other posts in the series
- Cisco IOS CLI Regex: sh ip bgp in
- IOS CLI Tip: More accurate pipe commands
- Cisco Nexus NXOS and Fixing broken “switchto” syntax with alias
- show ip eigrp topology all
- Cisco IOS CLI Shortcuts
- The poor man's IOS Traffic Generator
- IOS: "terminal monitor" on, off - logging to your terminal
- IOS: Console, Terminal, Monitor, VTY - what is what ?
- IOS: Clearing an interface configuration
- IOS: Setting Terminal Window Length
- IOS CLI: show run linenum
- IOS: Setting the TCP timeout on IOS
- IOS: enable and .... disable ?
- IOS: Reverse SSH console access - Part 2
- IOS:Open Source Lab DNS and IP addressing (This post)
- IOS: Reverse SSH console access
- ip tcp timestamp
- Cisco ASA and IOS command tip - test aaa-server
