Computer Certification Articles

1). 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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2). Cisco CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam Tutorial: An Introduction To BGP By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
When you're studying for the BSCI exam on the way to earning your CCNP certification, it's safe to say that BGP is like nothing you’ve studied to this point. BGP is an external routing protocol used primarily by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Unless you work for an ISP today or in the future, you may have little or no prior exposure to BGP. Understanding BGP is a great addition to your skill set – and you have to know the basics well to pass the BSCI exam.
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3). Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Distance Vector Command Review By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Part of studying for CCNA exam success is keeping all these new commands straight in your head! And let's face it, there are a lot of commands you need to know in order to pass the CCNA exam and earn that certification. Here's a review of some very important distance vector and static routing commands you need to know, along with their proper usage and console output.
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4). Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Keep Your Most Important Appointment By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Imagine this. You have an appointment with a client to work on a server or router install. A few minutes before you're scheduled to be there, you decide there's something really good on TV you'd like to watch. Or you decide to go to the gym, or play a game, or do anything else except go see the client. Even if you weren't going to get fired for not showing up, it's certainly unfair to the client.
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5). CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam Tutorial: The BGP Neighbor Process By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Like TCP, BGP is connection-oriented. An underlying connection between two BGP speakers is established before any routing information is exchanged. This connection takes place on TCP port 179. As with EIGRP and OSPF, keepalive messages are sent out by the BGP speakers in order to keep this relationship alive. Once the connection is established, the BGP speakers exchange routes and synchronize their tables.
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6). 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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7). CCNA / MCSE / CCNP Certification: Making Failure Work For You By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Whether you're on the road to the CCNA, CCNP, MCSE, or you're on any other computer certification track, the odds are that sooner or later, you're going to fail an exam. It's happened to almost all of us, yours truly included. What you have to keep in mind in these times is that success is not a straight line. You've probably seen charts showing the growth of an industry or a business -- you know, the ones that go from left to right, and look kind of jagged.
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8). 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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9). 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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10). 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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11). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam Review: Protocol Basics By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To earn your Cisco CCNA certification and pass the BSCI CCNP exam, you have to know your protocol basics like the back of your hand! To help you review these important concepts, here's a quick look at the basics of RIPv1, RIPv2, IGRP, and EIGRP. RIPv1: Broadcasts updates every 30 seconds to the address 255.255.255.255. RIPv1 is a classful protocol, and it does not recognize VLSM, nor does it carry subnet masking information in its routing updates.
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12). Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Port-Based Authentication By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To pass your CCNA exam and earn this coveted certification, you must understand the details of port-based authentication. This knowledge has a great deal of value in production networks as well, since this authentication scheme is regularly implemented. Let's take a look at this particular CCNA skill. Consider a situation where you have a server that will be connected to your switch, and you want the port to shut down if a device with a different MAC address that that of the switch attempts to connect to that port.
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13). CCNA By : Marcus Peterson
CCNA stands for Cisco Certified Network Associate - a certification for IT professionals that is issued by Cisco Systems, Inc., one of the most successful computer networking companies. Cisco manufactures and markets a wide range of devices for both enterprises and telecommunications carriers. Cisco is an abbreviation of San FranCISCO. The Cisco Certified.
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14). IT Certifications: Do Your Clients Even Understand Them? By : Joshua Feinberg
When targeting small businesses that are in the sweet spot size, what IT certifications do you typically need? One thing to keep in mind is that you are not selling to a real IT manager in most cases. Remember Who You Are Selling Your Services To Of course, there are exceptions to the rule in certain industries and certain types of businesses. Generally you’re selling to a non-technical, small business owner.
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15). Certification Q&A: The Basics Of Certification By : Cai Einarson
* What does certified mean? There are four accepted meanings of the adjective “certified” but only two of which satisfy the needed meaning. To be certified means to be endorsed with authority by an institution or a person with higher position after one successfully meets certain requirements. Another meaning is that a person is qualified to do a certain job as supported by an appropriate document better known and regarded as a Certification.
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16). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Tutorial: Frame Relay End-To-End Keepalives By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
One of the first things you learned about Frame is that the LMI also serves as a keepalive, or a heartbeat - and if three consecutive LMIs are missed, the line protocol goes down. There's a limitation to LMI as a keepalive, though. The LMI is exchanged only between the DTE and the closest DCE. The LMI is therefore a local keepalive that does not reflect any possible issues on the remote end of the virtual circuit.
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17). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam Tutorial: Dialer Watch By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
Dialer Watch is a vital part of your CCNA and CCNP studies, particularly for the BCRAN exam, but it's one of the most misunderstood technologies as well. To help you pass the CCNA and CCNP certification exams, here's a detailed look at Dialer Watch. Dialer Watch allows you to configure a route or routes as "watched" when the watched route leaves the routing table and there is no other valid route to that specific destination, the ISDN link will come up.
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18). The Advantages of Official Microsoft and Cisco Certification Training Courses By : Groshan Fabiola
Lots of aspirants in design and network management channel all their efforts in order to obtain highly recognized certifications such as MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer) and MCSA (Microsoft Certified System Administrator). These world-recognized certifications are much desired, as they can easily make the difference between a prosperous, lucrative career in designand an average, low-rewarding job as a programmer.
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19). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam Tutorial: Configuring PPP Callback By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
You may run into situations where a router in a remote location needs to dial in to a central router, but the toll charges are much higher if the remote router makes the call. This scenario is perfect for PPP Callback, where the callback client places a call to a callback server, authentication takes place, and the server then hangs up on the client! This ensures that the client isn't charged for the call.
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20). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam Tutorial: Floating Static Routes By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To pass the Cisco CCNA and CCNP certification exams, as well as becoming a world-class networker, you've got to know how and when to use floating static routes. And if you're wondering what makes them "float" -- read on! In this example, R1 and R2 are running OSPF over a Frame Relay network, 172.12.123.0 /24. They're also connected by a BRI ISDN link, 172.
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21). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Exam Tutorial: Testing ISDN Links Without Pings By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
To earn your Cisco CCNA and CCNP certifications, you've got to master ISDN - and despite what some people say, there's still a lot of ISDN out there that needs to be supported. And when it comes to troubleshooting ISDN, there's a lot to look at. Is the correct ISDN switchtype configured? Are the dialer map statements correct? What about the dialer-group and dialer-list commands? And that's just the start.
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22). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam: Frame Relay BECNs and FECNs By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
BECNs and FECNs aren't just important to know for your Cisco CCNA and CCNP certification exams - they're an important part of detecting congestion on a Frame Relay network and allowing the network to dynamically adjust its transmission rate when congestion is encountered. The Forward Explicit Congestion Notification (FECN, pronounced "feckon") bit is set to zero by default, and will be set to 1 if congestion was experienced by the frame in the direction in which the frame was traveling.
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23). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam: Frame Relay Encapsulation Types By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
When you're studying to pass the Cisco CCNA and CCNP certification exams, you quickly learn that there's always something else to learn. (You'll really pick up on this in your CCIE studies, trust me!) Today we'll take a look at an often-overlooked topic in Frame Relay, the encapsulation type. You don't exactly change this on a daily basis in production networks (not if you want to stay employed, anyway!), but it's an important exam topic that you must be familiar with.
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24). Don't Be Left Behind: The Right Computer Skills Can Make All The Difference By : Abraham Carter
Kelly Dodson knows firsthand why companies value the ability to use computers and software. An administrative assistant in Kansas, Dodson used to keep her CEO's calendar by hand, until one day an important meeting slipped through the cracks. That painful experience compelled her to seek training in the effective use of the company's scheduling software.
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25). Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam: Same Command, Different Results By : Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933
As a CCNA or CCNP, one thing you've got to get used to is that change is constant. Cisco regularly issues new IOS versions, not to mention the many different kinds of hardware they produce! While it's always nice to have "the latest and the greatest" when it comes to routers, switches, firewalls, etc., we have to be prepared for the fact that not all.
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