Lab Scope

Goal

This lab is a small physical Cisco environment for CCNA-oriented switching, management and troubleshooting practice.

The purpose is to connect networking theory with verified command-line work on real hardware while keeping experiments separated from the normal home network.

Why This Lab Exists

As part of my retraining as a Fachinformatiker für Daten- und Prozessanalyse, networking fundamentals matter because data platforms, BI systems, virtualization hosts and applications depend on reliable infrastructure.

The lab provides the physical network context for two connected portfolio layers:

• the related network-operations-data-lab, where sanitized operational records are transformed into structured data, SQL checks and BI-oriented outputs
• the planned proxmox-virtualization-lab, which will document a future dedicated virtualization host after suitable x86 hardware is available

The Proxmox connection is currently an architecture roadmap only. This repository does not claim that a Proxmox host has already been installed or validated.

In Scope

• Cisco IOS fundamentals
• device inventory and baseline checks
• console and SSH management
• IOS maintenance and rollback preparation
• NTP and log-time consistency
• VLAN creation and verification
• access ports and 802.1Q trunks
• STP and Layer 2 loop prevention
• EtherChannel and LACP
• basic switch hardening
• inter-VLAN routing on the Catalyst 3560CX
• future router labs with routing, NAT, DHCP and ACLs
• planned network segmentation for a future virtualization host
• access-port-first and optional later trunk-based Proxmox connectivity
• troubleshooting and reproducible documentation

Out of Scope

• presenting the lab as a production network
• exposing private network details or credentials
• uncontrolled experiments on the productive home LAN
• simulating enterprise scale without a concrete learning purpose
• presenting DataTideHH as a network consultancy
• documenting unverified Proxmox installation results
• hypervisor, VM, LXC, storage or backup administration, which belongs in the future proxmox-virtualization-lab

Intended Portfolio Role

This is a supporting infrastructure project for a Data/BI-oriented profile. It demonstrates technical care, controlled changes, validation, troubleshooting and documentation rather than a change of specialization into network administration.

The future Proxmox integration should strengthen this role by showing how a physical network layer can support virtualized services and generate operational data for a separate Data/BI workflow.