Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Setup: How To Configure Reverse Telnet

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

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 [...]

CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Tutorial: Assembling Your Cisco Home Lab

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

A CCNA or CCNP candidate who wants to be totally prepared for their exams is going to put together a home lab to practice on. With used Cisco routers and switches more affordable and plentiful then ever before, there’s really no excuse to not have one!
With the many different models available, there is some [...]

Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Access List Details You Must Know!

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

To pass the CCNA exam, you have to be able to write and troubleshoot access lists. As you climb the ladder toward the CCNP and CCIE, you’ll see more and more uses for ACLs. Therefore, you had better know the basics!
The use of “host” and “any” confuses some newcomers to ACLs, so let’s take a [...]

Cisco CCNP / BCMSN Exam Tutorial: Static VLANs

Friday, August 1st, 2008

BCMSN exam success and earning your CCNP certification requires you to add to your knowledge of VLAN configuration. When you studied for your CCNA exam, you learned how to place ports into a VLAN and what the purpose of VLANs was, but you may not be aware that there are two types of VLAN [...]

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Labs: Developing Troubleshooting Skills

Friday, August 1st, 2008

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 [...]

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Tutorial: Home Lab Assembly Case Study

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

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 [...]

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Tutorial: Cabling Your Access Server

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

A Cisco home lab is an invaluable study tool when you’re preparing for CCNA and CCNP exam success. Once you’ve gotten a couple of routers and switches, you’ll quickly get tired of moving that blue console cable every time you want to configure a different device. The solution to this problem is purchasing [...]

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Tutorial: Configuring An Access Server

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

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 [...]

Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Configuring Standard Access Lists

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

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. [...]

Cisco CCNP / BCMSN Exam Tutorial: Switches, QoS, And Cisco’s Networking Model

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

QoS is a big topic on your BCMSN and CCNP exams, and for good reason. As more and more traffic flows through today’s networks, accurately applying QoS to both your routers and switches becomes more important.
Note the phrase “accurately applying”. You must have a plan in place before you start configuring QoS on [...]