I have worked with various late policies and find that regardless of the policy, there will be late work.  With that being said, I do believe in the late penalties and comply with each of the ones that I have had to enforce.

There are some life circumstances that cause late work; however, there’s usually nothing preventing the work from being submitted early.

One way to have students work with routers/switches online is to use a lab program such as LabSim.  Basically they are able to walk through the commands that will be used in setting those devices up.  LabSim does a great job of working to show how to identify and work with various hardware components too.

In more advanced networking courses I have used the Cisco online live labs.  Those are much more involved than the LabSims and the student is essentially working on live networking equipment.

David