UAB Computer and Information Sciences Department

"Old" Instructional Computer Networking Lab


The "old" Instructional Computer Networking lab was originally funded by an NSF grant in 1993. It has been used continually since then for
CS 433/533 "Telecommunications and Computer Networking"
and CS 434/534 "Internetworking"

To date (August, 2001) the "old" lab has been used for 14 offerings of CS 433/533 (cumulative total of 432 students) and 16 offerings of CS 434/534 (314 students).

CAIDA-related Activities 2000 - 2001

Setup of the Physical Space

Before the Cisco routers were received, the CIS Department allocated space for a "new" Instructional Computer Networking lab, to supplement the "old" lab shown above. The department funded purchase of furniture for the new lab to provide for eight workstations. Pentium PCs were re-allocated from other departmental laboratories, to provide three PCs at each workstation. All PCs have two 10/100baseT Ethernet interface cards, so they can be used as routers if desired. An equipment rack was installed at the end of the laboratory.

Arrival of the CISCO routers

Three Cisco 7000-series routers arrived in May, 2000, and were bolted into the rack.


Interface Equipment for the Cisco Routers

Each Cisco router arrived with several serial plug-in "blades," an FDDI blade, and a HSSI blade. We were able to connect to the routers through the control port, and became familiar with the control language. However, none of the routers was received with an Ethernet plug-in blade, which made it impossible to connect any of the Cisco routers to the lab workstations. Thus, the routers remained unused for several months.

Later in 2000, FDDI equipment was re-allocated from the UAB Central Computing facility to the CIS Department, enabling us to link together the three Cisco routers in a FDDI ring.



Development of an Intranet in the "New" Networking Lab

Fortunately, in the Spring of 2001 we heard about some Ethernet blades that were not currently being used in the UAB Hospital, and were able to get these re-allocated to the CIS Department. Once these blades were installed, each Cisco router had six 10baseT Ethernet interfaces.

Once the Cisco routers had Ethernet interfaces available, we were quickly able to connect the Cisco routers to the workstation PCs. An intranetwork consisting of six Ethernet networks (two connected to each Cisco router), plus the FDDI ring connecting the routers, was quickly constructed and successfully tested.





Students in the "New" Networking Lab

In the Spring Term 2001 students in CS 434/534 "Internetworking" used the "new" lab for the first time, for two lab sessions on the subject of firewalls. However, this was before we could connect the Cisco routers to the lab PCs, so the Cisco routers were not used in this lab. Rather, these lab sessions explored the firewalling capabilities of Linux (specifically Red Hat Linux 6.2) running on one of the PCs at each of the eight workstations.

Dr. Barnard's home page

For further information E-mail Dr. Barnard