Challenges and solutions for real-time remote console access to telecommunication equipment

During the last decades hundreds of new platforms and sites for distance and virtual learning have appeared. Many of them are managed by universities or educational organizations, while the others are stages for know-how sharing by professionals and long-life learners. Despite the impact of all of these sites they lack a very important feature, which is vital for gaining hands-on experience - they do not provide means to perform any sort of practical exercises. In order to solve this challenge several new ways for distance and virtual learning have emerged. Many of the old e-learning sites and platforms have started to provide new means for performing simulation or emulation tasks and exercises, while other have invested into the development of entirely new and sometimes proprietary web-based solutions for performing these tasks. Lately a different type of solutions have emerged - ones that provide the possibility to perform tasks on real equipment. There are two ways in achieving this - trough virtualization of real devices and trough remote access to real equipment. While the first method is cheaper, since it does not require the purchase of the devices that are being virtualized it is not that reliable and sometimes it is not possible to fully virtualize a device or all of its features. This has clearly pointed out the remote access to real devices as the only available solution for gaining high quality hands-on experience. Despite the productivity and the guaranteed quality of this method it can be very hard to implement it. This is due to the fact that the remote access methods provide several challenges of their own. Many devices are simply not designed to be used remotely - a solution to this issue is to use middleware devices, which emulate a local connection with the targeted device and at the same time provide remote access from the outside network. A different challenge is to use the right method for establishing the remote access. There are several protocols and standards for this and each of them has its own advantages and drawbacks. Last but not least the process of setting the middleware devices can be very challenging. In this paper we investigate the possibility to create a remote access laboratory for access to specialized network devices. We provide information about the general topology of the laboratory and then we present our solution for configuring and providing remote access to routers and switches by using console servers. The paper is concluded by an analysis of the results of our efforts and by directions for future work.