Networks Articles

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Tuesday, 21st March 2006 @ 9:38 PM

BSCI exam success, not to mention earning your CCNP, can come down to your OSPF route summarization skills. There are a few different commands and situations you need to be ready for, and one of these situations is the proper use of the "summary-address" command. The summary-address command should be used on an ASBR in order to summarize routes that are being injected into the OSPF domain via redistribution. In the following example, four routes are being redistributed into OSPF o... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Monday, 20th March 2006 @ 6:20 PM

Passing the BCSI exam and earning your CCNP certification requires you to know OSPF stub areas inside and out. Stub areas, total stub areas, a little study on not-so-stub stub areas ... and pretty soon your head is swimming. Then when you hear that EIGRP offers stub routing, your first reaction may be unprintable! But while EIGRP stub routing is effective in the right situation, it's not as complex as OSPF stub routing. Let's take a look at basic EIGRP stub routing. While EI... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Monday, 20th March 2006 @ 4:36 PM

CCNA exam success depends on mastering the fundamentals, and two important fundamentals are knowing exactly what the terms "collision domain" and "broadcast domain" mean. In this free Cisco tutorial, we'll take a look at the term "collision domain" and how a collision domain is defined. A collision domain is an area in which a collision can occur. Fair enough, but what "collision" are we talking about here? We're talking about collisions that oc... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Thursday, 2nd March 2006 @ 7:55 PM

Preparing to pass the BSCI exam and earn your Cisco CCNP? Route summarization is just one of the many skills you'll have to master in order to earn your CCNP. Whether it's RIP version 2, OSPF, or EIGRP, the BSCI exam will demand that you can flawlessly configure route summarization. Route summarization isn't just important for the BSCI exam. It's a valuable skill to have in the real world as well. Correctly summarizing routes can lead to smaller routing tables that are... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Thursday, 2nd March 2006 @ 7:55 PM

Microsoft is revamping its certification tracks, and will eventually retire the familiar MCSE certificatons. The new certification setup is much like Cisco's, where there are specialist certifications to go along with the more general CCNA, then mid-level certifications such as the CCNP, and then a more-advanced practical exam modeled somewhat after the coveted CCIE certification. Microsoft's new specialist exams are the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) exams. ... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Tuesday, 28th February 2006 @ 6:02 PM

Preparing for your BSCI exam on your way to the Cisco CCNP certification, you can quickly get overwhelmed by the details! Here are five commonly overlooked points you should keep in mind when it comes to your OSPF studies. The virtual link command includes the area number of the transit area, and if authentication is being used on Area 0, the virtual link command must include the authentication statement. Since the virtual link is a logical extension of Area 0, it stands to reason that ... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Tuesday, 28th February 2006 @ 5:58 PM

When you're studying for your CCNA exam on the way to earning this coveted Cisco certification, the details can seem overwhelming! In this article, I'll point out five Frame Relay details that you must keep in mind when you're on your way to the CCNA exam! Inverse ARP starts working as soon as you open the serial interface. This protocol performs dynamic Frame Relay mapping, but you don't have to enable it - it's already enabled as soon as you enter the command &q... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Tuesday, 28th February 2006 @ 5:57 PM

Microsoft is in the middle of a major push to overhaul its certification program. Last year, they announced the new Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) certification, which is not a written exam but rather a practical exam that will be graded by a board of examiners. Just applying for the certification will require 10 years' experience in IT as well as three years of practical experience as a network architect. For those of us not quite ready for that, Microsoft has announced that ... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Friday, 17th February 2006 @ 2:56 AM

When you're studying for the CCNA and CCNP exams, you've got a lot of different choices when it comes to training. One popular choice is choosing one of the many "boot camps" and five-day in-person courses that are out there. I've taught quite a few of these, and while many of them are good, they do have drawbacks. Of course, one is cost. Many employers are putting the brakes on paying for CCNA and CCNP boot camps, and most candidates can't afford to pay ... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Friday, 17th February 2006 @ 2:55 AM

Whether you're just starting to think about passing the CCNA or CCNP exams, or you've been on the certification track for a while, you've got to have a plan for success. If you wanted to drive your car from Florida to California, you'd create a plan to get there. You'd get a map and decide how far you wanted to drive per day, and maybe even make some hotel reservations in advance. You certainly wouldn't get in your car, just drive it randomly down the nearest highwa... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Wednesday, 15th February 2006 @ 8:16 PM

CCNA certification demands that you master the basics of OSPF, and for many studying for the CCNA exam, their first exposure to OSPF is a hub-and-spoke configuration. That's a tough way to get started, because a hub-and-spoke configuration built over an NBMA technology such as Frame Relay requires quite a bit of attention to detail. Let's take a quick look at several common OSPF configuration errors and how to avoid them on your CCNA test. Make sure the hub is the designated r... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Tuesday, 14th February 2006 @ 7:01 PM

To pass your BSCI exam and earn your CCNP certification, you've got to master route summarization. When you get to the BSCI level, actually breaking the routes down into binary strings and performing summarization is second nature to you. (If it isn't, get some more practice!) What makes CCNP / BSCI route summarization more difficult is just keeping the different protocol summarization commands straight! RIP and EIGRP both perform route summarization at the interface level with ... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Tuesday, 14th February 2006 @ 5:34 PM

In studying for your CCNA exam and preparing to earn this valuable certification, you may be tempted to spend little time studying static routing and head right for the more exciting dynamic routing protocols like RIP, EIGRP, and OSPF. This is an understandable mistake, but still a mistake. Static routing is not complicated, but it's an important topic on the CCNA exam and a valuable skill for real-world networking. To create static routes on a Cisco router, you use the ip route co... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Monday, 13th February 2006 @ 6:57 PM

To pass the BSCI exam and earn your CCNP certification, you've got to master the (many) details of OSPF. You might have thought there were quite a few OSPF details in your CCNA studies, but you'll now build on that foundation on the way to earning your CCNP. One such detail is the role of the Autonomous System Border Router (ASBR) in OSPF. The name itself raises some eyebrows, since you learned in your CCNA studies that OSPF doesn't use autonomous systems! Just as an OSPF A... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Monday, 13th February 2006 @ 6:56 PM

When you're getting started on your CCNA studies on your way to earning this certification, you're swamped with network device types that you're familiar with, but not quite sure how to use. Let's look at these networking devices and their main purposes. Hubs and repeaters operate at Layer One of the OSI model, and they have one main purpose - regenerating the electrical signal that Layer One technologies carry. This regeneration helps to avoid attenuation, the gradual... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Thursday, 9th February 2006 @ 4:13 PM

When you're studying to pass the CCNA exam and earn your certification, you're introduced to a great many terms that are either totally new to you or seem familiar, but you're not quite sure what they are. The term "collision domain" falls into the latter category for many CCNA candidates. What exactly is "colliding" in the first place, and why do we care? It's the data that is being sent out onto an Ethernet segment that we're concerned with her... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Thursday, 9th February 2006 @ 4:12 PM

When you're studying for your BSCI exam and CCNP certification, you quickly realize that BGP is a whole new world from anything you've previously studies. One topic that sometimes confuses CCNP candidates is when a BGP route reflector needs to be configured. In the following example, the routers R1, R2, and R3 are all in BGP AS 100. This is not a full mesh, however. There are peer relationships between R1-R2 and R1-R3, but not between R2 and R3. R3 is advertising network 3.3... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Wednesday, 8th February 2006 @ 10:57 PM

In the first part of this free CCNP / BSCI tutorial, we looked at how leaving one simple word out of our route redistribution configuration - "subnets" - resulted in an incomplete routing table when redistributing routes from RIP to OSPF. (If you missed that part of the tutorial, visit my website's "Free Tutorials" section.) Today, we'll look at redistributing OSPF routes into RIP and identify another common redistribution error. We are using a three-router net... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Wednesday, 8th February 2006 @ 9:08 PM

When you're studying to pass the CCNA exam and earn your certification, you're introduced to a great many terms that are either totally new to you or seem familiar, but you're not quite sure what they are. The term "broadcast domain" falls into the latter category for many CCNA candidates. A broadcast domain is simply the group of end hosts that will receive a broadcast sent out by a given host. For example, if there are ten host devices connected to a switch and ... more...

Computers » Networks | By Chris Bryant @ Tuesday, 7th February 2006 @ 10:17 PM

If there's one CCNP / BSCI topic that looks so easy but can lead to a real headache, it's route redistribution. I'm not even talking about the routing loops and suboptimal routing that can result when route redistribution is done without proper planning - I'm talking about the basic commands themselves. Leaving out one single command option, or forgetting what else needs to be redistributed when redistributing dynamically discovered routes, can leave you with a routing tab... more...