Information for CNT Instructors

This page is a portal for information and documentation relevant to CNT instructors, but not directly relevant to students.

Technical Information

Distributing Files to Student Computers

A common need of instructors is to distribute files, sometimes large files, to a large number of student computers. Examples include various software, lab files, pre-built VMs and ISO files. Because this is an ongoing need we have worked with the campus IT department to develop a method for doing this over the campus network.

All CNT instructors should have write access to the "\\obs\cntshare\Student D Drive Files" directory. Files placed in this folder are automatically copied to all PCs in the labs during the overnight hours. Students will be able to find these files in the "D:\CNT Files" folder on their individual systems the following day. If there are any problems with the automatic synchronization working please contact IT with a helpdesk request.

If you need to distribute files to students the same day the overnight sync will not work. In that case you can put files in the same location on the server and ask students to download the files themselves to their systems from the "\\obs\CNTstudents" share which they have read-only access to. Note that large files will take a long time to download, especially if an entire room is downloading them at once. You are encouraged to try to plan at least a day in advance so the files can be synced overnight.

NOTE: Our share on the OBS server is for bulk storage, it is not backed up by the IT department. Make sure to backup important files elsewhere!

Terminal Emulation Software

The campus has upgraded computer labs to Windows 7 which no longer includes the HyperTerminal software. In addition the text mode telnet application is not available by default. In preparation for this we have worked with the IT department to offer two alternatives. Both Tera Term and PuTTY should be pre-installed on lab systems. Students are exposed to both of these in various classes and either will work for most of the Cisco labs.

Tera Term

Tera Term is probably the closest replacement for HyperTerminal. In fact, some of the CCNA 1 labs specifically contain a Terra Term alternative lab. Tera Term supports Telnet, SSH and direct serial connections.

Differences with HyperTerminal:

• Break Sequence is ALT-B
• Copy and Paste is ALT-C and ALT-V
• Transfer->Capture Text is now File->Log and Transfer->Send Text File is now File->Send File
• File transfers (eg. IOS recovery) are now File->Transfer->XMODEM

PuTTY

PuTTY, the popular SSH program for Windows can also replace many of the functions of HyperTerminal and has some nice additional features but is generally organized in a very different way than Hyper Terminal or Tera Term. PuTTY supports Telnet, SSH and direct serial connections.

Differences with HyperTerminal:

• To send a break sequence right click on the title bar and select Special Command->Break
• Simply highlight any text to copy it and right click in the PuTTY window to paste it
• A session can be logged by right clicking on the title bar and choosing Change Settings->Session->Logging
• File transfers are not supported