Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Setup: How To Configure Reverse Telnet
Occasionally, during your CCNA and CCNP studies, you’ll run into a term that just doesn’t quite make sense to you. (Okay, more than occasionally!) One such term is “reverse telnet”. As a Cisco certification candidate, you know that telnet is simply a protocol that allows you to remotely connect to a networking device such as a router or switch. But what is “reverse telnet”, and why is it so important to a Cisco CCNA / CCNP home lab setup?
Where a telnet session is started by a remote user who wants to remotely control a router or switch, a reverse telnet session is started when the host device itself imitates the telnet session.
In a CCNA / CCNP home lab, reverse telnet is configured and used on the access server. The access server isn’t a white box server like most of us are used to; an access server is a Cisco router that allows you to connect to multiple routers and switches with one session without having to move a rollover cable from device to device.
Your access server will use an octal cable to connect to the other routers and...