Stub Lab FAQ’s

The equipment used in the Stub Lab can be found on the Stub Lab information page located at Free CCNA Workbook Stub Lab

The Stub Lab is cabled to the Free CCNA Workbook topology which is used by all labs published by Free CCNA Workbook. The topology information and diagrams can be found by clicking on the Topology link in the navigation menu found at the top of this page.

The Stub Lab is available to use by registered members at no charge and is hosted by Free CCNA Workbook. The Stub Lab is NOT free to have; Free CCNA Workbook will not ship you a fully assembled lab, that is nonsense.

The Stub Lab was built so that any visitor could sign up and reserve a three hour session of lab time for free so they can complete labs found on the Free CCNA Workbook website using real hardware.

First, you will need to register at the Free CCNA Lab Schedule Portal if you have not already done so and than you’ll be able to sign in and view the current Free CCNA Lab reservation matrix. From there you can create a new reservation by selecting ‘Reserve’ in the date/timeslot you wish to reserve. Do not forget to set your timezone prior to scheduling a session or your session will be scheduled in UTC.

To connect to the Stub Lab you’ll need to use a terminal emulation application that supports telnet such as Putty or SecureCRT. Once you have a telnet capable application you’ll need to connect to to the address; stublab.freeccnaworkbook.com on the following port numbers;

You need to verify that you’re not behind a Corporate or ISP firewall that is blocking outbound telnet access. You may need to ask your network administrator or ISP if they are blocking telnet access.

To log into the Stub Lab devices you’ll use the same credentials that you use to log into the Stub Lab schedule portal. Generally, this would be your email address and password unless you’ve been provided other credentials by Free CCNA Workbook staff. Please note that credentials ARE case sensitive!

The first step is to check and see if the device is currently powered on. To do this you’ll need to use the ~p command to bring up the console server power menu. This menu will independently control the power for the device you’ve established an exec session to.

Safeguards have been put in place to prevent people from doing “stupid things” to the devices that require staff to attend to them such as erasing the boot image on the switch which requires the image to be install back onto flash via xModem. This is a waste of our time therefore we have disabled the following commands;

     ¹copy run

     ²delete

     erase

     format

     debug all

     no service password-recovery

¹ The commands; copy running-config startup-config and copy startup-config running-config (or any abbreviation thereof) are permitted.

² The delete command can only be used to delete non-critical files, such as vlan.dat on switches.

The Free CCNA workbook Staff reserves the right to drop any lab reservation(s) at any time for any reason.

This means that your authentication is being rejected. This can be caused by one or two things. First, check your timezone to see if it is set correctly in the schedule portal, if you observe Daylight Saving Time (DST) than adjust your timezone accordingly + or – one hour. This can also be caused by using the backspace key in your password when you make a mistake, use the delete key instead of backspace as backspace will insert ^h instead of delete the previous character as intended.

If you are preparing for the CCNA Certification than this is something you MUST know! If you are new to Cisco networking than your answer can be found here! Cisco 2600 Series Router Password Reset

If you logged into the stub lab using your credentials (email and password) and powered on the lab device(S) and you’re being prompted for a password than this is either a console or enable password. Please try “cisco” first or any variation thereof. If this does not work than someone who used the lab before you has left a password on the device and you must recover the router using the password reset procedure found in Lab here: Cisco 2600 Series Password Reset
If someone left a password on a Cisco switch than you must contact support to have this manually reset.
Please note that if you leave passwords on switches that are not “cisco” you will be banned without warning.

The Stub Lab devices do not have an internet connection as the lab is completely isolated. This may change down the road depending on feature request(s).

If you have a question that is not listed in the FAQ’s than you can contact Free CCNA Workbook support at; support @ freeccnaworkbook dot com

Check out the Cisco Documentation for this one…