Computer Certification Articles

1). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Setup: How To Configure Reverse Telnet By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Occasionally, during your CCNA and CCNP studies, you'll run into a term that just doesn't quite make sense to you. (Okay, more than occasionally!) One such term is "reverse telnet". As a Cisco certification candidate, you know that telnet is simply a protocol that allows you to remotely connect to a networking device such as a router or switch. But.
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2). Cisco Routing: "ip default-network" vs. Default Static Routes By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
One point of confusion for some CCNA and CCNP candidates is the difference between configuring a static default route and using the Cisco routing command ip default-network. At first glance, they appear to do the same thing. Both configure a destination to which packets should be routed if there is no more specific route in the routing table. The.
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3). Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Variance And Unequal Cost Load Balancing By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To pass the CCNA exam, you've got to know how to work with IGRP and EIGRP unequal-cost load balancing. You may not see much IGRP in production networks anymore, but you'll see a lot of EIGRP, and part of fine-tuning your EIGRP network is making sure that all paths are in use while allowing for varying bandwidth rates. Using the variance command is the easy part - it's getting the metric that's the hard part with IGRP.
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4). Cisco CCNP / BCMSN Exam Tutorial: Changing Root Bridge Election Results By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Your BCMSN and CCNP studies will include mastering the details of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). While you learned some of these details in your CCNA studies, quite a bit of it may be new to you. Before going on to the intermediate and advanced STP features, let's review the root bridge election process and learn how to change these results. Each switch will have a Bridge ID Priority value, more commonly referred to as a BID.
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5). Cisco CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: OSPF Route Redistribution Review By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
OSPF route redistribution is an important topic on the BSCI exam, and it's a topic full of details and defaults that you need to know for the exam room and the job. To help you pass the BSCI exam, here's a quick review of some of the OSPF route redistribution basics. To see if a router is an ABR or ASBR, run show ip ospf. This also displays any routes being redistributed into OSPF on this router.
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6). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Tutorial: Home Lab Assembly Case Study By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Part of your CCNA / CCNP education is deciding what network topology to use when you're putting together your home lab. Some of you are starting with one or two routers or switches, while others are starting with more. A customer recently sent me a list of his Cisco routers and switches that he has available for a home lab and asked for my help in coming up with the best way to use them.
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7). Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Route Summarization By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Preparing to pass the CCNA exam and earn this important Cisco certification? Route summarization is just one of the many skills you'll have to master in order to earn your CCNA. Whether it's RIP version 2, OSPF, or EIGRP, the CCNA exam will demand that you can flawlessly configure route summarization. Route summarization isn't just important for the CCNA exam.
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8). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Tutorial: Configuring An Access Server By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
As your CCNA / CCNP home lab expands, an access server such as the Cisco 2509 or 2511 is one of the best investments you can make. In this article, we'll look at the basic configuration for an access server and discuss how to connect to the other routers and switches in your pod through the AS. Here's part of a configuration from one of my access servers: ip host FRS 2006 100.
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9). Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Configuring Standard Access Lists By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Access Control Lists (ACLs) allow a router to permit or deny packets based on a variety of criteria. The ACL is configured in global mode, but is applied at the interface level. An ACL does not take effect until it is expressly applied to an interface with the ip access-group command. Packets can be filtered as they enter or exit an interface. If a packet enters or exits an interface with an ACL applied, the packet is compared against the criteria of the ACL.
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10). Cisco CCNA Certification: Defining Broadcast Domains By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
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.
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11). Passing Your CCNA and CCNP: Configuring And Troubleshooting Router-On-A-Stick By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
For CCNA and CCNP candidates, it's hard not to laugh the first time you hear the phrase "router on a stick". Let's face it, that's a pretty silly term. But as those who have passed the CCNA and CCNP exams know, this is a vital exam topic that you must know how to configure and troubleshoot. Basic Cisco theory states that for hosts in different VLANs to communicate, a Layer 3 device must be involved to handle the routing between the VLANs.
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12). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam Tutorial: ISDN And Multilink PPP By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
ISDN is a huge topic on both your Cisco CCNA and BCRAN CCNP exams. While many ISDN topics seem straightforward, it’s the details that make the difference in the exam room and working with ISDN in production networks. Configuring and troubleshooting multilink PPP is just one of the skills you’ll need to pass both of these demanding exams. With BRI, we've got two B-channels to carry data, and both of them have a 64-kbps capacity.
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13). Cisco CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam Tutorial: The HSRP MAC Address By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To pass the BCMSN exam and earn your CCNP, you've got to know HSRP inside and out! Part of that is knowing how the MAC address of the virtual router is derived, and another part is knowing how to change this address. We'll look at both features in this tutorial. We've got two routers on a segment running HSRP, so first we need to find out what the MAC address of the HSRP virtual router is.
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14). Cisco CCNA / CCNP / BCMSN Exam Review: Trunking And Trunking Protocols By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To earn your CCNA or CCNP certification, you've got to understand the basics of trunking. This isn't just a CCNA topic - you must have an advanced understanding of trunking and etherchannels to pass the BCMSN exam and earn your CCNP as well. Before we address those advanced topics, though, you need to master the fundamentals! A trunk allows inter-VLAN traffic to flow between directly connected switches.
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15). Cisco CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: The Passive Interface Command And OSPF By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To pass the BSCI exam and become a CCNP, you have to be aware of the proper use of passive interfaces. You learned about passive interfaces in your CCNA studies, but here we’ll review the basic concept and clear up one misconception regarding passive interfaces and OSPF. Configuring an interface as passive will still allow the interface to receive routing updates, but the interface will no longer transmit them.
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16). Cisco CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: 10 ISIS Details You Must Know! By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Earning your CCNP certification and passing the BSCI exam depends on knowing the details of many Cisco technologies, ISIS chief among them. To help you prepare for exam success, here's a list of ISIS terminology and basic concepts that will help you pass this tough exam. Enjoy! ISIS Terms: Domain: section of the network under common administrative control Area: logical segment of the network composed of contiguous routers and their data links Intermediate System: A router.
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17). Cisco CCNP / BSCI Certification: The Local Preference BGP Attribute By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
When studying for your BSCI exam for the CCNP, you get your first taste of BGP. One of the major differences between BGP and the other protocols you've studied to date is that BGP uses attributes to describe paths, and to influence the selection of one path over the other. In this free tutorial, we're going to take a look at the Local Preference attribute and compare it to the Cisco-proprietary BGP attribute "weight".
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18). Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Loopback Interfaces By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
As a CCNA candidate, you most likely have some background in PC hardware and workstation support. If so, you're already familiar with loopback interfaces, particularly 127.0.0.1, the loopback address assigned to a PC. When you're learning all about the different physical interfaces for your CCNA exam - serial, ethernet, and BRI, among others - there's one logical interface you need to know about, and that is - you guessed it! - the loopback interface.
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19). Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Configuring Dialer Profiles By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
The most common method of configuring ISDN is with dialer maps, but dial information can also be configured on a logical interface. To pass the CCNA exam, you must know how to configure and troubleshoot both dialer maps and dialer profiles. Dialer Profiles allow different dialing information to be configured onto logical interfaces. The logical interfaces may have different dialing destinations, different remote router names, etc.
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20). Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: IGRP And Equal Cost Load Balancing By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To pass the CCNA exam, you've got to know the role of the bandwidth command with IGRP and EIGRP and when to use it. In this tutorial, we'll configure IGRP over a frame relay hub-and-spoke network using the following networks: R1 (the hub), R2, and R3 are running IGRP over the 172.12.123.0 /24 network. This is a T1 line. R1 and R3 are also connected on a different subnet, 172.
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21). Cisco CCNA Certification: How And Why Switches Trunk By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Your CCNA studies are going to include quite a bit of information about switches, and for good reason. if you don't understand basic switching theory, you can't configure and troubleshoot Cisco switches, either on the CCNA exam or in the real world. That goes double for trunking! Trunking is simply enabling two or more switches to communicate and send frames to each other for transmission to remote hosts.
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22). Cisco CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: Using The OSPF Command “Area Range” By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Your BSCI and CCNP exam success depends on knowing the details, and one such detail is knowing the proper way to summarize routes in OSPF. Route summarization is not just a test of your binary conversion abilities, but knowing where and when to summarize routes. It will not surprise any CCNA or CCNP certification candidate that OSPF gives us the most options for route summarization, and therefore more details to know! OSPF offers us two options for route summarization configurations.
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23). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification: OSPF E2 vs. E1 Routes By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
OSPF is a major topic on both the CCNA and CCNP exams, and it's also the topic that requires the most attention to detail. Where dynamic routing protocols such as RIP and IGRP have only one router type, a look at a Cisco routing table shows several different OSPF route types. R1#show ip route Codes: C - connected, S - static, I - IGRP, R - RIP, M -.
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24). CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam Tutorial: Server Load Balancing (SLB) By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
When you're working on your BCMSN exam on your way to CCNP certification, you'll read at length about how Cisco routers and multilayer switches can work to provide router redundancy - but there's another helpful service, Server Load Balancing, that does the same for servers. While HSRP, VRRP, and CLBP all represent multiple physical routers to hosts as a single virtual router, SLB represents multiple physical servers to hosts as a single virtual server.
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25). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Labs: Developing Troubleshooting Skills By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
CCNA / CCNP candidates are going to be drilled by Cisco when it comes to troubleshooting questions. You're going to have to be able to analyze configurations to see what the problem is (and if there is a problem in the first place), determine the meaning of different debug outputs, and show the ability not just to configure a router or switch, but troubleshoot one.
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