Setup DNS server in your lab
If you do a lot of telnetting in your lab, you could set up an internal DNS server to be able to use router names instead of IP addresses.
Select a router that will act as the DNS server and configure it on all other routers in your lab. For example, if your DNS server has IP address 10.0.0.1, use the following configuration commands:
ip domain-lookup
ip name-server 10.0.0.1
On the DNS server, disable DNS lookup and DNS forwarding (it has nowhere else to go) and define all the routers as IP host names:
no ip domain lookup
!
ip dns view default
no dns forwarding
!
ip dns server
!
ip host Core-1 10.0.0.1
ip host Core-2 10.0.0.2
ip host POP 192.168.2.1
ip host Ext 192.168.1.5
ip name-server 10.0.0.1
If you also define IP addresses for the WAN links, for example:
ip host serial-1-0.X1 10.0.1.6… you'll get correct hop-by-hop information from the traceroute command:
ip host serial-1-0.Core-1 10.0.1.1
POP#trace Ext
Translating "Ext"...domain server (10.0.0.1) [OK]
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to Ext (192.168.1.5)
1 serial-1-0.Core-1 (10.0.1.1) 36 msec 24 msec 16 msec
2 serial-1-0.X1 (10.0.1.6) 24 msec 28 msec 4 msec
3 Ext (192.168.1.5) 20 msec * 24 msec
I've managed to configure my access router as split DNS for my Windows XP home LAN and it works great as long as it only handles A/SRV records. MX records are already a problem; my outbound mail was stuck for several weeks while IIS SMTP server was trying to resolve MX records.
When I've added a Fedora 8 Linux box that insists on running IPv6 (even though it's been turned off in every possible place I found), I've experienced huge startup delays in some applications (most notably Firefox) as they try to use IPv6 name resolution (AAAA records plus some other stuff) and Cisco IOS is less than perfect in forwarding them. In the end, I've used an external DNS for the Linux box ... and moved my SMTP server from IIS to Postfix.
ps
and yeah I love postfix very much too ;)