Card install - more ports, yeah!

In a home lab environment, you have two choices when sourcing traffic.  Loopbacks and physical ports.  One of the advantages of sourcing from a physical port is the port has a unique MAC address associated with it, which can come in handy in certain scenarios.  Want to constrain that port to a vlan? No problem with a physical port, but assigning a loop back to a vlan? Not so much.

More importantly than my source traffic having an associated MAC address is my ability to connect my home lab to the Internet.  The Cisco 2620 XM routers I'm using only come with two ports; a fast Ethernet port and serial port.  When interconnecting the routers to eachother, I quickly ran out of available ports.  I got all the routers and switches interconnected, but had no port to connect my edge router to the Internet.  I needed more port density and that's where the new card came in.

In building a network from scratch, the issue of all my log times being wrong became apparent.  Cisco devices will default to some time in the past and NTP is required to sync the clocks on these devices.  Accurate log times are imperative in troubleshooting; coorelating events can be a very powerful tool in determining what the hell broke and what broke first.

In reading about NTP, the recommended set up is to sync an edge router (switches do not have internal clocks to sync) to a trusted "external" time source. There are a number of free NTP devices on the Internet, which can be found at www.ntp.org

My problem was, after interconnecting my three 2620's to eachother and to the distribution level L3 switches (3550's), there were no available ports on my edge router to connect to the Internet/an NTP time source.

So I found this card on eBay for $40 and got 4 more ports! Yeah, 3 of them are old-school Ethernet (10 MBPS), but I'm not running an empire from these routers, just practicing.

Pretty easy install.  Remove a couple screws on cover, plug in the card and viola! More ports:)