Had a bunch of hardware arrive the past few days. Primarily various NM and WIC modules for Cisco gear. I’m getting close to the point where I don’t need anymore modules. The time I had the last evening or two was spent testing.
Generally when I get gear in I will tag it with a little paper tag and put it into a test router. The tag lets me know where I got the part from. So far I have not had any failed parts or needed to send them back to sellers for refunds. The first basic test I do is of course, does it show up in the router? Then I’ll configure the interfaces with static addresses. If I have a lot of devices to test that day I will configure some quick dynamic routing protocols and start pings between all the interfaces. The goal is to get a fairly full mesh setup going, with packets originating and arriving at each interface. Once the packets are sent I will check the interfaces for errors. No errors, then I assume it is fairly good hardware.
