Home Lab question - help!

[mistaking]

Hi I am new here.

I am intending on taking the 640-801 exam.
In preperation of gettign started with the course I have managed to blag the following:
2 x Cisco 2501 Routers and
2 x Cisco 3500 Catalyst Switches

Although I have managed to blag this equipment for free I have no cables.

I have been advised I can use a 60 pin DCE to DTE to connect the routers and configure a virtual circuit, however I also want to connect each switch to a router ( and then a pc to each switch)

How do I connect the router and switch? Can this be doen directly ? Do I need a special cable?

Please advise?

 

[ADB100]

From memory the 2501 has 2 60-pin Serial and an AUI Ethernet port (15-pin D-type wuth AUI written above it). What you need here is a 10BaseT Transceiver, this connects to the AUI port and has an RJ45 socket. Simply use a straight-though Cat5/6 cable from a switchport to this.

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/access/ap/ap_ts2/transc.htm

Cisco used to provide 10BaseT transceivers but I think they were re-badged. Have a look on eBay or similar, they shouldn't be too expensive.

To connect the serial ports you need a 60-pin DCE to DTE cable, again there are plenty on eBay. These connect from a serial port on one router to the serial port on the other. The ends of the cables are labelled DCE & DTE, you need to configure the DCE end to provide a clock:

!
interface serial 0
clock rate 128000
!

Various speeds up to 2Mb can be selected (try pressing ? after the 'clock rate' command.

Andy