55 hands-on Routing scenarios you build in your own Cisco Modeling Labs instance and grade against the answer key. Routing configuration and troubleshooting practice for CCNA and CCNP.
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Two internal subnets behind a branch router stopped working after a summarization tidy-up. Everything else inside the same /16 summary is fine, and the edge still has a discard route for the summary. Your job: trace which route each hop actually matches for those destinations, then restore reachability without removing or weakening the summary.
A dual-stack static routing lab with a subtle IPv6-only failure. IPv4 reaches across the WAN from a branch PC to an HQ server and loopback, while IPv6 to the same destinations fails. The IPv6 addressing on interfaces is correct; the break lies elsewhere. Compare what IPv4 knows versus what IPv6 knows for the same four destinations and make IPv6 match the working IPv4 design.
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.
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A branch user in VLAN 10 cannot reach the data center's line-of-business server, stalling the end-of-day batch upload. Two faults sit behind the one complaint, and clearing either alone leaves the user where they started. The client gets no answer from its own gateway either.
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.
Deploy a stateless DHCPv6 service on a remote router and relay client Information-Requests from a branch LAN across a routed core to that server. IPv4 is already fully functional; your job is to build the IPv6 DHCPv6 relay path and confirm clients receive DNS/domain options while keeping IPv6 addressing via SLAAC.
Daily CCNA IPv6 lab: build OSPFv3 across a three-router triangle with dual-stack links and real end hosts. IPv4 OSPFv2 is pre-built and forwarding end-to-end as the baseline. Your tasks: bring R3 into OSPFv3 with an explicit router-id and enable it per-interface, activate OSPFv3 on R1’s R3-facing interface, then steer the preferred IPv6 path by adjusting interface cost. Verify neighbor state, routes, and end-to-end IPv6 reachability from host to host.
Deploy single-area OSPFv3 between two routers so IPv6 LANs reach end-to-end. The IPv4 side is already forwarding with static routes. Your job: enable OSPFv3 with explicit router-ids and activate it per-interface on both the transit and LAN links, then verify the neighbor forms over link-local and routes are learned.
Build a redundant campus triangle with two distribution switches and one access switch. Implement PVST+ per-VLAN root tuning so VLAN 10 forwards over DSW1 while VLAN 20 forwards over DSW2. Verify that each VLAN chooses a different root and that the blocked uplink differs per VLAN, while end hosts in each VLAN can still reach their local SVI gateway IP.
Influence a downstream access switch’s STP root-port choice using per-interface path cost and port priority. You will make the access switch prefer the non-default uplink so that the intended link forwards while the other becomes the alternate/blocking path. Validate with show commands and end-to-end host pings.
Deploy a centralized DHCP service across subnets using DHCP relay (ip helper-address). A branch client on a switched LAN requests an address from a DHCP server that resides at HQ. You will configure the relay on the branch gateway, create a DHCP pool for the remote subnet on the HQ router, verify the client lease and default gateway, and test end-to-end connectivity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Advanced static-routing capstone, run as a fault hunt. Two suites were cut over last night and now Suite-B is unreachable, Suite-A gets replies only sometimes, and one client cannot even reach its own gateway. Nothing was written down. You get symptoms and the required end state — no fault list. The faults span both routers and the access switch, and the routing table being present does not mean it is right.
Advanced VRRP on a single VLAN: configure two VRRP groups on R1/R2 so each router is Master for one group and Backup for the other, distributing host egress while preserving gateway redundancy.
In this advanced CCNP BGP lab, you will steer a single router's outbound path choice using Cisco's Weight attribute, the very first BGP best-path tiebreaker. R1 (AS 65001) peers eBGP with two ISPs (R2 in AS 65002 and R3 in AS 65003). Both ISPs advertise the same prefix 172.16.50.0/24. Your job is to make R1 prefer the R3 path using the neighbor weight command and verify the outcome using IOS and Linux tools.
Advanced CCNP BGP lab: Build parallel eBGP sessions between two ASes over primary and backup /30 links. Originate a service prefix from AS 65001 and influence AS 65002's inbound path by applying outbound AS-path prepending on the backup session only. Validate best-path selection and next-hop on the neighbor, and confirm reachability from hosts.
Configure eBGP between two routers and originate select connected /24s using the exact-match 'network ... mask' command. Verify that only the intended prefixes are advertised and learned by the neighbor, and use host-based tests to confirm reachability to the advertised networks. This beginner CCNP lab reinforces that the BGP network statement only advertises a route if an exact match exists in the RIB, and that the 'mask' keyword is mandatory for non-classful advertisements.
Configure and validate BGP local-preference to prefer one provider when the same destination prefix is learned from two eBGP neighbors. You will see two equal AS-PATH routes to 172.16.100.0/24 on the edge router and then apply an inbound route-map on the R2 session to set local-preference 200 so the edge prefers exiting via R2. Verification includes host pings/traceroute and router BGP best-path checks.
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.
Advanced EIGRP capstone, run as a fault hunt. The branch LAN has disappeared from the network, one router sees only half its neighbours, and the routing process looks healthy on every device. Nothing was recorded. You get symptoms and the required end state — no fault list. Faults span all three routers, and two of them leave EIGRP running perfectly while doing nothing useful.
Every routing problem reduces to one question: does this router have a path to that destination, and is it the path you intended? Static routes, OSPF, EIGRP and BGP are four different ways of answering it, and they interact — administrative distance decides which one wins, longest-prefix match decides which entry is used, and a default route quietly catches everything nobody planned for. Understanding the routing table as a decision process, rather than a list, is what separates someone who can configure a protocol from someone who can fix a network.
These labs build that judgement on real Cisco IOS in Cisco Modeling Labs. You'll configure static and default routes, bring up OSPF and EIGRP adjacencies, peer BGP, and then watch the routing table resolve the conflicts between them. Verification runs through show ip route, show ip protocols and show ip route <prefix> so you learn to read why a route was chosen, not just that it exists. Break/fix scenarios inject the faults that actually happen — a summary that swallows a more specific prefix, a next-hop that isn't reachable, an administrative distance that lets the wrong source win, a missing return route that makes a one-way path look like a dead network. Each submission is graded requirement by requirement, so 'I can ping it' is never mistaken for 'the routing is correct'.
Static and default routing, OSPFv2 (single and multi-area, with summarization), EIGRP, and BGP including eBGP peering and path attributes. Each protocol has its own hub if you want to drill one in isolation.
Longest-prefix match decides first, then administrative distance decides between sources offering the same prefix, then the protocol's own metric. Several labs are built specifically to make that ordering visible in show ip route rather than leaving it as a table you memorised.
Both. Static routing and single-area OSPF are CCNA; multi-area OSPF with summarization, EIGRP tuning, BGP path selection and the multi-fault troubleshooting capstones are CCNP depth. Every lab is tagged by track so you can filter.
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