All had a completely separate mac-address.

I hooked the USB-to-Ethernet NICs onto a Windows box via the same USB hub as I’m using in Ubuntu and I had no issues. Notice eth3, rename28 and rename 29 all have the same mac-address. Has anyone ran into an issue where there usb nics all show up as the same mac-address? Also, only 1 NIC is named 'eth#' and the rest are named 'rename#'. I’m looking forward to hear your experience with these USB NICs. If you are thinking about implementing this solution, let me know. Another advantage of this solution is that you can connect it to your laptop so you don’t have to think about a compatible motherboard for your Quad NICs. This is all that you need for the CCIE R&S lab (besides 2x 3560 and 2x 3550 switches). All frames are being tagged with VLAN 200 using 802.1Q encapsulation.įor less than $ 100 you can buy 12 USB NICs and a decent USB HUB. I just sent a ping to the broadcast address to generate traffic. You can see that 802.1Q encapsulation is working. I configure an IP address on this interface so I can generate some traffic from this interface. I create VLAN 200 for my eth2 interface (one of the USB sudo ifconfig eth2.200 1.1.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 Secondly I load the 802.1Q vconfig add eth2 200 To see if these cheap USB NICs would work I installed Ubuntu to test 802.1Q sudo apt-get install vlanįirst I have to install VLAN support because it is not enabled by modprobe 8021q This one only has 7 USB ports but I found some others on Dealextreme that have 10+ USB ports.

I also bought some USB HUBs from Dealextreme. They support FastEthernet and they can do trunking (802.1Q encapsulation). These USB NICs from Dealextreme cost $4.80 a piece at the moment and I bought 12 of them. I wanted to see if I could buy some cheap USB NICs and use those instead of my Quad NICS, Here’s what I bought: You also need a motherboard that supports 3x PCI slots so most people end up buying a seperate “GNS3 Server” for the Quad NIC solution. The downside of this card is that you’ll find them for $150 – $200 on Ebay and for the CCIE lab you’ll need 3 of them. The quad NIC solution works very well and as a result many people are looking for the D-Link DFE-580TX card that is working very well. I spent more time fixing the breakout switch than doing actual labs.

Ports going into err-disabled mode without really understanding why, MAC addresses flapping and other nasty stuff.

I don’t really like the breakout switch solution because I’ve had way too many issues with it. There are three options to connect your real switches to GNS3:

How to select serial cable in gns3 free