ECTA: Edinburgh Community Technology Academy

Building a Cisco Networking Academy

Over the past few months we've been building our first Cisco Community Networking Academy at Net Resources in Edinburgh's West End.

The technical infrastructure work is now complete and Net Resources Academy is live. Along the way, we took some photos, and this article tells the story of the rollout.

We were assisted throughout the build by our Glasgow based Cisco Regional Academy the Govan Initiative, and were able to provide work experience placements for two recent Panduit graduates from the Hills Trust Community Learning Academy. Kevin and Richard joined us earlier this year for a few weeks as we installed the structured cabling for the Cisco lab.

Measuring the cable runs, and creating and testing all the ethernet kept us busy for a few days. All ten workstations in the lab were equipped with dual connections to the comms cabinet.

RJ-45 ports were logically numbered and colour coded so that future trainees can make quick patching decisions when administering the network equipment during labs, and then configure the equipment from the comfort of their individual workstations. 

Over twenty Cat5e cable runs, makes 80 twisted pairs, 160 strands of copper wire. Testing revealed only one short wiring fault. Pretty good going, and a real credit to Kevin and Richard. 

Next step was to rack mount our Cisco routers and switches. This bundle of equipment, along with other gear donated by the Hills Trust enabled us to design a flexible array of devices for a wide range of lab cases, as well as improve our own infrastructure both at Net Resources Academy, and ECTA in Wester Hailes. With the kit installed, we were ready to start some layer 2/3 testing.

Since then we've been running through all the early practical labs in the CCNA programme, testing that the new network and equipment are working as designed, and that the technical environment makes sense from a learner point of view.

With everything now operational, we have a very pleasant working environment in which to simulate real world networking scenarios, and are looking forward to starting work with our first CCNA intake on May 1st.

We are all very grateful to the many people and organisations who have helped us get to this point, in particular, Kevin, Richard, Stephen and the team at Hills Trust, George Henderson for the rack, Electrocom Networks for the cabling supplies, our ECTA colleagues, and of course Cisco, Microsoft and the Edinburgh Joined up for Jobs initiative.

All photos by RichardX.