CCNA: HSRP Preemption & Tracking — Fail Over and Back

Archive lab

Daily CCNA campus-redundancy lab focusing on HSRP preemption and interface tracking. You will refine an already-working HSRP default gateway so it follows real network health: fail to the standby when the preferred router loses its upstream, and preempt back when it recovers. The topology is an enterprise-clean small site with two distribution routers sharing a user VLAN through a Layer-2 access switch, each with its own point-to-point uplink to a core router. The starter works in steady state but suffers a blackhole during uplink failures and never reclaims Active without preemption. Your job is to add preempt and tracking on the correct router/interface and verify end-to-end forwarding under failover and failback.

Learning objectives

• Enable HSRP preemption on the intended Active router so it reclaims the gateway role after recovery.
• Attach interface tracking to the Active router’s upstream interface with a decrement large enough to lose the election when that link fails.
• Validate HSRP state transitions (Active/Standby, preemption enabled, track object applied) with show commands.
• Verify end-to-end reachability from the user host during steady state, failover, and failback.
• Practice operational testing: simulate an upstream failure and observe HSRP role changes and client reachability.

Troubleshooting focus

• If the client loses internet reachability during an uplink failure but HSRP still shows the preferred router Active, tracking is missing or applied to the wrong interface.
• If the preferred router recovers but stays Standby, preemption is missing or disabled.
• If pings fail even in steady state, verify the client’s default gateway is the HSRP virtual IP and both distribution routers have correct LAN IPs in the same VLAN.
• If SSH access to routers fails, confirm the VTY access-class permits the client subnet and that RSA keys exist.