Setting up a Home Cisco Lab

I wanted to practice my labs at home so I built myself a home lab. It's 3 Cisco 1841 routers with WIC - 2T cards and 2 Cisco Catalyst 2950 series switches. I mounted them on a band stage rack that fits nicely on my desk. I power the operation with a mounted power strip with on off switches for each outlet. I bought it all on EBay and Amazon piece by piece. 

The first 1841 router I bought was described as "new and in pristine condition" but was also dirt cheap. I was not surprised when it didn't work when I got it. The faceplate was falling off and it would only boot to ROMMON mode. I made my claim on Amazon and they resolved it by giving me my money back and I got to keep the router. I was very happy with this because while waiting for the claim to settle I had fixed the router. I taped the faceplate on and turned out the router just needed an image file, which I copied over from the set of 2 I had bought in the meantime. As a bonus it has a 64MB card instead of the basic 32MB card. So It boots real quick and is very responsive during use, all for free.  

The switches were easier. I bought them as a pair. When they arrived I noticed one has a very loud fan. I contacted the seller and they said they would send a replacement fan. I have not heard from them since.

I recently bought the WIC-2T interfaces and smart serial cables. One of the WICs were bad and a replacement is already on the way. 

Even the power strip had issues on arrival, I opened the box and parts of one of the switches sat in the bottom.  The seller promptly sent out a new one and I got to keep the old one. The old one works fine except for the one missing a switch. I plan on mounting it on my fiancé's desk to clean up the cords there. 

I have tested everything else and all ports and cables are working great.

Advice for those who plan on building their own

1. Only buy from established sellers with near to perfect feedback or ratings.
2. Read all descriptions carefully
3. If you're like me and looking for the cheapest option, expect faulty equipment.
4. Test every port. Make sure ports actually function with settings applied to them. when I first installed the WIC-2Ts, I thought they were good because the router recognized them but I found  one that would stay down after settings were applied.
5. Test every cable.  
6. Make sure you have everything you need: rack mounts, power cords, Console cables, a serial port on your computer or buy a USB to RS-232 DB9 Serial Adapter.  (I use this and this. I like having all connected at once  to instantly see the connections )
7. you will need software: tftp server, a terminal program, and drivers for the USB to RS-232 DB9 Serial Adapter . I use Tera Term and Open TFTP Server. Both are free and easy to use. The quad cable I linked to before should have a disk with the drivers. Otherwise, the driver is made by FTDI and is available here. If you get another cable it may use the prolific driver available here.
8. It's not going to be cheap.

Links to what I bought and how much it cost me:

 

1x Cisco 1841 router w/serial cable	Free
1x Serial to USB cable	$10.05
2x Cisco 1841 router w/rack mounts and serial cable	$150.98
2x Cisco Catalyst 2950 series 24port switch	$99.78
1x Rack	$29.95
1x Rack mountable power strip	$19.99
1x Cisco 1841 rack mounts	$9.18
2x Console Cable	$3.36
1x Serial to USB quad cable	$45.89
10x 3' Crossover Cat5e cable	$34.90
2x 1.5' Smart serial cable	$15.50
3x Cisco WIC-2T	$56.97
Total	$476.55

It was a bumpy expensive road but I am happy with the result. I can now practice with real equipment whenever I want to. Packet Tracer is good, but nothing can beat the real thing.