OSPF practice labs

CCNP Route Control: A Second Boundary and the Distance Trap

Add a second boundary router for resilience, then stop it from routing the acquired site's routes the long way round.

CCNP45 min3 objectives

CCNP Route Control: Seed Metrics and External Types

Set one seed metric for every route entering EIGRP, and carry EIGRP routes into OSPF as type 1 externals.

CCNP55 min3 objectives

CCNP Route Control: Join Two Routing Domains

HQ runs OSPF and the company it bought runs EIGRP. Join them at the boundary router so both sites reach each other.

CCNP40 min3 objectives

Free with an account

CCNP VRF & GRE: Routing Over the Tunnel

The tunnel works, but static routes won't scale. Run OSPF across it, and size its packets so nothing gets dropped.

CCNP45 min3 objectives

CCNP VRF & GRE: A Routing Process per Tenant

Static routes don't scale. Give each tenant its own OSPF process, so its routes are learned instead of typed.

CCNP52 min3 objectives

CCNA L3 Switching: A New VLAN, End to End

A new building-systems VLAN has been provisioned. Carry it, route it and advertise it so its controllers reach the edge.

CCNA46 min3 objectives

CCNA L3 Switching: Bring the Switch Into OSPF

The static routes are gone. Bring the distribution switch into OSPF so the campus and the edge learn each other.

CCNA42 min3 objectives

CCNA Break/Fix: The Adjacency That Forms and Never Finishes

A late-night rollback restored configs from before a WAN carrier change. Since then, both branches report OSPF neighbors that appear, start exchanging, and then reset—never reaching FULL. Users at Branch A cannot reach Branch B. Your task is to observe the partial adjacency behavior, isolate why the database exchange never completes, and restore the carrier’s standard everywhere it applies so reachability returns end-to-end.

CCNA65 min5 objectives

CCNA Break/Fix: Both Branches Went Quiet at 02:14

An overnight hardening change reached the core but not the branches. By morning, both OSPF adjacencies to the core were down even though every point-to-point link still pings and no addressing changed. Restore end-to-end reachability by diagnosing what the core and each spoke now disagree about on the carrier-facing transits and finishing the change on the branch ends.

CCNA50 min5 objectives

CCNA Break/Fix: The Branches the Core Cannot See

Daily CCNA troubleshooting drill: Two branches can ping the core over their transit links, yet the core does not learn any branch routes. Your job is to trace how OSPF is enabled on each device, isolate why the core’s routing table is missing the branch LANs and loopbacks, and bring both branches into the correct OSPF area without changing how the core enables it.

CCNA45 min5 objectives

Free with an account

CCNA Break/Fix: The OSPF Neighbour That Never Forms

A regional retailer's branch lost core access after last night's maintenance window. Users reach their gateway and the routers ping across the transit, but no OSPF neighbour appears and the branch LAN is missing from the core's table. The documented design is OSPF process 1, area 0 on both routers. Restore the adjacency without changing addressing or adding static routes.

CCNA55 min5 objectives

CCNA Foundations: Dual-Stack — Both Protocols, One Network

Build a compact dual-stack enterprise topology where IPv4 is already forwarding end-to-end using OSPFv2. Your task is to bring up IPv6 routing in parallel using OSPFv3 with explicit router-ids, proving that IPv6 control/data planes operate independently from IPv4. Verify both protocols resolve separately and that an IPv4 control-plane failure does not impact IPv6 forwarding.

CCNA85 min5 objectives

CCNA Foundations: OSPF Day 8 — OSPF Troubleshooting Capstone

Advanced CCNA OSPF troubleshooting capstone on Cisco Modeling Labs (CML-Free). A three-router, two-host enterprise-style topology is pre-broken with multiple independent OSPF faults. Your job: diagnose and fix them so adjacencies form across areas and the end hosts can reach each other. The final solution forwards end-to-end and adheres to clean OSPF hygiene.

CCNA65 min4 objectives

CCNA OSPF Day 7: Passive Interfaces + Default Origination

Deploy OSPFv2 across a small branch-to-edge topology, mark user-LAN interfaces passive, and originate a default route at the edge so branch hosts learn O*E2 and can reach an internet-facing host. You will implement, verify, and troubleshoot OSPF passive interfaces and default-information originate.

CCNA55 min5 objectives

CCNA Foundations: OSPF Day 6 — Route Summarization at the ABR

A compact, enterprise-clean, 5-node CML lab that builds on OSPF multi-area design. You will enable OSPF across a small core–ABR–branch topology, advertise multiple branch networks in area 10, and summarize them at the ABR using 'area range'. You will verify that specific inter-area routes are replaced by a single summary in area 0 while preserving end-to-end reachability between hosts.

CCNA55 min5 objectives

CCNA Foundations: OSPF Day 5 — Multi-Area OSPF & the ABR

Build and verify a compact, enterprise-clean multi-area OSPF network with an ABR. Configure area 0 and a non-backbone area, advertise loopbacks and LANs, enforce OSPF hygiene (passive LANs, explicit router-ids), and verify O IA inter-area routes from the endpoints.

CCNA55 min5 objectives

CCNA Foundations: OSPF Day 4 — Cost & Deterministic Path Selection

Build a 5-node triangle OSPF topology with a branch and a data center connected by two paths: a direct link and an indirect path via a core router. Implement OSPFv2 with clean hygiene (router-ids, passive on LANs), then influence path selection by adjusting interface cost so branch-to-DC traffic prefers the core path. Verify the chosen path from the end hosts using traceroute and confirm symmetric routing by validating the reverse path.

CCNA55 min5 objectives

CCNA Foundations: OSPF Day 3 — DR/BDR Election on a Broadcast Segment

Three IOS routers share a true broadcast multi-access segment through a Layer-2 switch. You will deploy OSPFv2, influence the DR/BDR election using interface priorities, and verify full adjacencies to the DR. An alpine client behind RTR-HQ-R3 must reach loopbacks on RTR-HQ-R1 and RTR-HQ-R2 via OSPF-learned routes. The lab emphasizes proper multi-access deployment hygiene (router-ids, passive default, interface selection) and realistic verification from the end host.

CCNA45 min4 objectives

CCNA Foundations: OSPF Day 2 — Router IDs & Neighbor States

Build a two-router OSPFv2 lab, assign deterministic router-ids using loopbacks, form a clean adjacency from Down through Exchange to FULL, and verify neighbor state and router-ids. End-to-end reachability is validated from real hosts across an enterprise-clean topology.

CCNA48 min5 objectives

CCNA Foundations: OSPF Day 1 — Single-Area Adjacency

Bring up OSPFv2 adjacency between two branch routers over a point-to-point /30, advertise each site’s user LAN and router loopback in area 0, and verify end-to-end pings succeed from the hosts. The baseline ships with addressing and SSH management ready; you will enable and tune OSPF only.

CCNA42 min4 objectives

BGP Troubleshooting Capstone: eBGP + iBGP Repair

Advanced BGP capstone, run as a fault hunt. The hub lost its upstream service route overnight and the branch cannot see hub prefixes either. Sessions are not all down, which is what makes it interesting: one peering never establishes, one establishes and carries nothing, and one prefix is never originated at all. You get symptoms and the required end state — no fault list. Faults span all three routers, and one of them is not in BGP at all.

CCNP75 min5 objectives

Lab 3: iBGP over Loopbacks with OSPF Reachability

Build an internal BGP (iBGP) peering between two IOS routers in the same AS over stable Loopback0 addresses, with OSPF providing loopback reachability. Each router originates a /24 from Loopback1 into BGP, and next-hop/peering behavior is validated from end hosts. This lab emphasizes the deterministic neighbor configuration (remote-as, update-source Loopback0, router-id) and exact-match network origination, supported by a minimal, secure OSPF core.

CCNP55 min5 objectives

Transit AS: Carry eBGP across iBGP (next-hop-self)

In this CCNP-level lab (BGP Fundamentals Lab 4/10), you will build a small, realistic transit-AS scenario: an external route learned by R1 via eBGP from AS 65003 must be carried across iBGP to R2 inside AS 65001. You will intentionally encounter the classic iBGP next-hop problem (R2 sees an unreachable next-hop for 172.16.30.0/24) and fix it on R1 with neighbor next-hop-self. iBGP peering runs over Loopback0 addresses with reachability provided by OSPF area 0 between R1 and R2. Two hosts validate end-to-end data-plane reachability and routing control-plane state.

CCNP55 min5 objectives

EIGRP Manual Route Summarization (AS 100)

Implement classic EIGRP manual summarization on R1 to collapse four contiguous /24 loopback routes into a single /22 summary toward R2, reducing R2’s routing table entries while preserving reachability.

CCNP40 min5 objectives