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 [...]

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 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 CCNA Certification Exam Tutorial: Distance Vector Command Review

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

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 [...]

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 Tutorial: The BGP Attribute NEXT_HOP

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

When you’re studying for the BSCI exam on the way to earning your CCNP certification, you’ve got to master the use of BGP attributes. These attributes allow you to manipulate the path or paths that BGP will use to reach a given destination when multiple paths to that destination exist.
In this free BGP tutorial, we’re [...]

Cisco CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: Not All Static Routes Are Created Equal

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

As a CCNP candidate, as a CCNA, and in getting ready to pass the BSCI exam, you may be tempted to breeze through your static route studies, or even skip them! That’s because static routes are easy enough to configure, and as long as you remember the syntax of the ip route command, you’re in [...]

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 Certification: BGP Route Reflector Tutorial

Friday, August 1st, 2008

When you’re studying for your BSCI exam and CCNP certification, you quickly realize that BGP is a whole new world from anything you’ve previously studies. One topic that sometimes confuses CCNP candidates is when a BGP route reflector needs to be configured.
In the following example, the routers R1, R2, and R3 are all in [...]