So I managed to purchase some ProctorLabs time when MikeD was having his 2for1 special and I finally got to use it tonight.

There are 3 times slots available per day. the times are based around EST( -4)  which in Australia EST (+10) makes the session times start at  6am, 2pm and 10pm.  Each session lasts for 7h45m.  So I booked a 2pm start with the intention to come home from work early!  There are 4 guys in our team at work and today 2 called in sick and the 3rd had to leave at 12….. Due to this I managed to miss the first 3hours of my session.

Once I was logged into their website and loaded up the control page for my rack, I was presented with  the option to telnet into each device seperately or use a terminal server.  I went the terminal server route. One window is easier imho. On this page there is also the ability to remotely power cycle the device, Reset the device ( including config), Clear the terminal server line and some options for saving/loading configs that I didn’t explore.

Once I was up and running everything was suprisingly smooth. All four of the switches in my rack were 3560’s and the routers werew 2800’s so there were no drama’s with the hardware and I happily did my labs for about 4hours. There is a topology diagram available, thou normally I prefer to use cdp as it gets you more familar with the kit.

My only possible ciritsm is the delay/lag, but as I’m located in Australia and these racks are in America somewhere it’s understandable so i will just have to type slower!.

Thats about it. Just wanted to post this up in case anyone else was thinking about using proctorlabs.