CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: Route Summarization And The OSPF Null Interface

Monday, March 9th, 2009

CCNP exam success, particularly on the BSCI exam, demands you understand the details of route summarization. This skill not only requires that you have a comfort level with binary conversions, but you have to know how and where to apply route summarization with each individual protocol.
You also have to know the “side effects” of [...]

What Certification Should You Pursue After The CCNA ?

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Once you’ve got your CCNA, you’re ready to move on to the next level, the Professional certifications. For years, Cisco had one Professional certification, the Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification. Over time, Cisco has expanded this level of certifications to include the Cisco Certified Security Professional (CCSP) and Cisco Certified Voice Professional (CCVP).
With security [...]

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 CCNP / BSCI Tutorial: The Role Of The OSPF ASBR

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

To pass the BSCI exam and earn your CCNP certification, you’ve got to master the (many) details of OSPF. You might have thought there were quite a few OSPF details in your CCNA studies, but you’ll now build on that foundation on the way to earning your CCNP.
One such detail is the role of the [...]

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 / BSCI Tutorial: Comparing OSPF and ISIS Hellos

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

While studying to pass the BSCI exam and preparing to earn your CCNP certification, you’ll quickly notice that while OSPF and ISIS are both link-state protocols, there are a lot of differences between the two. One major difference is the way the two protocols handle hello packets.
Hello packets are imperative to keeping OSPF and [...]

Cisco CCNP / BSCI Certification: Troubleshooting Route Redistribution, Part I

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

If there’s one CCNP / BSCI topic that looks so easy but can lead to a real headache, it’s route redistribution. I’m not even talking about the routing loops and suboptimal routing that can result when route redistribution is done without proper planning - I’m talking about the basic commands themselves. Leaving [...]

Cisco CCNP / BSCI Certification Exam: Five OSPF Details You Must Know

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Preparing for your BSCI exam on your way to the Cisco CCNP certification, you can quickly get overwhelmed by the details! Here are five commonly overlooked points you should keep in mind when it comes to your OSPF studies.
The virtual link command includes the area number of the transit area, and if authentication is [...]

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 [...]

Cisco CCNP / BSCI Certification: Route Redistribution And The Seed Metric

Monday, September 1st, 2008

In the first part of this free CCNP / BSCI tutorial, we looked at how leaving one simple word out of our route redistribution configuration - “subnets” - resulted in an incomplete routing table when redistributing routes from RIP to OSPF. (If you missed that part of the tutorial, visit my website’s “Free Tutorials” [...]