Cisco Switch Baseline

This document describes the public-safe baseline for a small Cisco switching lab.

The goal is not to publish real device configuration, but to document the learning setup, validation steps and operational data concepts in an anonymized way.

Scope

The lab uses a compact Cisco Catalyst switch as a local CCNA-level switching platform.

The current baseline focuses on:

• basic Layer 2 switching
• local management access
• SSH-based administration
• public-safe interface documentation
• later VLAN and trunking exercises
• later collection of sanitized operational data

Current baseline state

The hardware baseline has been verified in a local home-lab environment.

Verified capabilities:

• switch boots successfully
• local console access works, including a macOS USB-serial workflow
• management SVI receives an address via DHCP
• management address is stabilized through a local router DHCP reservation
• connected client ports negotiate at 1 Gbit/s full duplex
• one uplink path and two client-facing links have public-safe interface descriptions
• local router is reachable from the switch
• external reachability checks from the switch are successful
• connected clients can access the network through the switch
• SSH access is enabled for local management
• Telnet is disabled
• HTTP and HTTPS web management are disabled
• automatic configuration download and provisioning features are disabled for the lab context
• baseline configuration changes are saved to startup configuration

Management model

The switch is managed through:

• local console access for recovery and initial setup
• SSH for normal local administration

The web interface is intentionally not used.

Public-safe handling

Real configuration exports must not be committed to this repository.

Do not publish:

• real serial numbers
• real MAC addresses
• real hostnames
• real management IP addresses
• public IP addresses
• Tailscale IP addresses
• password hashes
• user secrets
• full running-config or startup-config outputs from real devices

Only sanitized examples and synthetic sample data should be used.

Useful verification commands

The following commands are useful for documenting the lab state without publishing sensitive raw output:

show version
show boot
show ip interface brief
show interfaces status
show interfaces description
show vlan brief
show mac address-table dynamic
show running-config | section line vty
show running-config | include ip http|ip ssh|domain-lookup
show users
ping <local-gateway-ip>
ping <external-test-ip>

Any resulting output must be reviewed and sanitized before publication.

Current sanitized topology concept

The verified private lab can be represented publicly only as a generic topology pattern:

LAB_ROUTER
  -> local wireless bridge / media bridge
LAB_SWITCH_01
  -> LAB_CLIENT_A
  -> LAB_CLIENT_B

This intentionally omits the real router model, real repeater model, real switch hostname, real client names, IP addresses, MAC addresses and serial numbers.

Next steps

Planned next steps:

1. create sanitized sample outputs based on the verified baseline
2. extend the sample CSV model with topology and port-description fields
3. add SQLite import and validation logic for the extended sample data
4. document VLAN 10 / VLAN 20 / VLAN 30 as a lab roadmap
5. keep real configuration exports, private addressing and real device identifiers outside the public repository