Cisco CCNA / CCNP Exam Tutorial: Five Debugs You Must Know

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

To pass the BSCI exam and move one step closer to CCNP certification success, you’ve got to know how and when to use debug commands to troubleshoot and verify network operations. While you should never practice debug commands on a production network, it’s important to get some hands-on experience with them and not rely on [...]

Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Variance And Unequal Cost Load Balancing

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

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 [...]

Cisco CCNP / BSCI Tutorial: Route Summarization With RIP And EIGRP

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

To pass your BSCI exam and earn your CCNP certification, you’ve got to master route summarization. When you get to the BSCI level, actually breaking the routes down into binary strings and performing summarization is second nature to you. (If it isn’t, get some more practice!) What makes CCNP / BSCI route summarization more difficult [...]

Cisco CCNA Certification: Broadcasts, Unicasts, And Multicasts

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

When you begin your CCNA studies, you get hit with a lot of different networking terms right away that you might not be familiar with. What makes it a little more confusing is that a lot of these terms sound a lot alike. Here, we’re going to discuss the differences between broadcasts, multicasts, and unicasts [...]

Cisco CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam Tutorial: Route Summarization Basics

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

As you earn your CCNA and CCNP certification, you’re going to have to get comfortable with manually summarizing routes. This isn’t just another reason to learn binary math (although it’s a good one!), but summarizing routes is a true real-world skill that can help your network operate more efficiently. So the question [...]

CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam Tutorial: EIGRP Stuck-In-Active Routes

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Passing the BSCI exam and earning your CCNP is all about knowing the details, and when it comes to EIGRP SIA routes, there are plenty of details to know. A quick check in a search engine for “troubleshoot SIA” will bring up quite a few matches. Troubleshooting SIA routes is very challengin in that there’s [...]

Cisco CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: The Passive Interface Command And OSPF

Monday, September 1st, 2008

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 [...]

Cisco CCNP / BCSI Exam Tutorial: Configuring EIGRP Packet Authentication

Friday, August 1st, 2008

Configuring RIPv2 and EIGRP authentication with key chains can be tricky at first, and the syntax isn’t exactly easy to remember. But for BSCI and CCNP exam success, we’ve got to be able to perform this task.
In a previous tutorial, we saw how to configure RIPv2 packet authentication, with both clear-text and MD5 authentication schemes. [...]

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Certification Exam Review: Protocol Basics

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

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 [...]

Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Route Summarization

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

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 [...]