Thanks for the heads up on gns3. We've been using a new version of PacketTracer for some labs at school in addition to real equipment, and it works pretty well, though it does have issues with RSA key generation and a couple other things. The instructors have been encouraging us to get our hands on real equipment to get used to different IOS versions and different equipment that has its own quirks (mostly command syntax). PacketTracer is available to Cisco students and alumni, but I'm sure one could find it as, uh... an extended trial version as well. ------------------------------------------------------------ Katherine Scrupa Network Technology CCNA student, RRC