Wondering how to get started as a network engineer? In this post I’m going to cover some ways to get started on your journey to be in the networking specialization field of Information Technology which will be hereby referred to as I.T. I’ve been working within this field for more than 10 years now and…
I don’t know if you’re like me, but I seem to always mix up the neighbor relationship requirements of OSPF and EIGRP if I haven’t been recently studying the topic. I’d like to do a quick review so that we both have a new frame of reference and something we can quickly come back to…
Your perception of how a routing protocol should operate may be heavily influenced by the first protocol you support in a production environment. For example I was first exposed to BGP when I settled into my entry level NOC position some years ago. As a result I referred to the communication of prefix and NLRI…
This could be considered somewhat of a niche topic but voice vlan/switchports are covered in the CCNA exam, and perhaps more importantly you will deal with this configuration in most Cisco friendly production environments. Relevant CCNA Topics Covered: Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 1 (100-105) Section 2.4 Most Cisco IP phones have an embedded 3-port…
What is a trunk port, and how do they help your network? Relevant CCNA Topics Covered: Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 1 (100-105) Section 2.0 A trunk port is a port that has the ability to switch frames on multiple vlans. Switchports assigned to only one vlan are called access ports, and can be statically assigned…
What is a VLAN, and how do they help your network? Relevant CCNA Topics Covered: Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 1 (100-105) Section 2.0 VLAN stands for Virtual Local Area Network. It is a term and technology that you will deal with quite often as a network engineer. A VLAN and its application within…
This post will cover some basics of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet specification and its application in Cisco gear. My expectation is that you have read or will read the Cisco Press study guides to gain a deeper understanding of some of the underlying technologies that I will reference in this document. Relevant CCNA…
