I just recently got my CCNA and bought some routers from the teacher that he had laying around to do some home labbing. While two of them are good and more modern, the third one is an old 2611 from like 2005. It has 8 MB of internal flash memory and 32 MB of DRAM. I think it can be upgraded to 16 MB of flash and 64 MB DRAM as top capacity. The version it's running is 12.3 (10). Which from what I've noticed is pretty limited in its feature capabilities, including I think lack of support for SSH and some other crypto/security features. Most of the possible replacement flash images I want for it can't even fit as it is now. It can't run IPv6 at all either.
I'm not even sure about full support for EIGRP... from what I understand, that is a newer routing protocol, only fully implemented in 2013 from what I read. But typing in 'router eigrp' on an interface there still seems to be accepted, despite this version being 13 years old. I haven't tried any actual in depth setup yet. Does anyone know if this is supported by my router and IOS version?
Basically I'm trying to decide whether or not to upgrade the flash and memory on this old router and then get a new feature set, or if it's more worth it just to buy a new router altogether and save the hassle.
Also, is there a difference between installing a new system image into flash and actually upgrading the version of IOS? I take it there's a limit to how recent of a version the hardware certain older routers can support.
Thanks.