Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: RIP Details You Must Know

Monday, April 6th, 2009

RIP isn’t exactly the most complex routing protocol on the CCNA exam, but that makes it easy to overlook some of the important details you must keep in mind in order to pass the exam! To help you review for the exam, here are just a few of those details!
RIP’s default behavior is to [...]

Cisco CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: RIP Update Packet Authentication

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

When you earned your CCNA, you thought you learned everything there is to know about RIP. Close, but not quite! There are some additional details you need to know to pass the BSCI exam and get one step closer to the CCNP exam, and one of those involves RIP update packet authentication.
You’re familiar with some [...]

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: 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 / 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 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” [...]

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 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 [...]