NETcisco

NETcisco was a project designed to assist people in passing the Cisco Certified Engineer exams. It did this by giving the users online access to routers running the Cisco OS, saving them the problem of spending lots of money on a training course or purchasing the equipment themselves.

The NETcisco project was designed to be a profitable company and so will charge users for the time spent using the routers. Payment would be made through the use of credit card and the site featured automated billing at the end of each month, as well as the ability to see, and print, your current and previous bills. To ensure the safety of the information being transfered, and stored, the site would use 128bit security certificates as well as a number of other features.

As well as being used for access to the routers, the site was designed to become a community area for people that use or are interested in the Cisco OS. Featuring numerous forums for different areas like questions about the OS, problems or technical difficulties and general comments it allowed the users to help each other. Only registered users could submit to the forums, though they will be viewable by anyone that comes to the site.

The system was designed to allow users to book hour slots whereby they would have the booked router to themselves and can access the OS through a web interface. Users can also simply log on at any time and begin using a router should one be available. Obviously, should the router have been booked by someone later, then the current user would be warned that their session will automatically finish in 10 minutes, and then 5 minutes, to allow that person to save any required information before their session finished.

To try and ensure that users do not miss sessions they could opt for email notification at a set distance beforehand and should the user already be logged on they would be presented with a message stating that their session is about to start.