I want to share my experience studying for, and taking the DevNet associate test. It took a long time to get enough momentum In my study routine to take the test, but I did finally take it and passed! I will admit that I did not one-shot the test but I managed to pass on…
What is your LAN uplink strategy? Uplinks are an important component of LAN design since they provide the upstream pathway to other devices within the network, and are the method by which traffic is transported out of the network. In this example, I’d like to look at a 2960 access-layer switch and work through an…
There will be times when you want to test a physical copper link to validate the layer 1 path between two interfaces. If you were on-site of course you could use a physical cable tester but if you are working remotely like we often are, you still have an option. On some models of Cisco…
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…
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…
