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 [...]

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 Certification / BSCI Exam Tutorial: Comparing IRDP And HSRP

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

To pass the BSCI exam, you need to know the difference between IRDP and HSRP. While they have the same basic function, the operation and configuration of each are totally different.
The aim of both is to allow hosts to quickly discover a standby router when the primary router fails. IRDP is commonly used by Windows [...]

How To Become a Cisco CCNP

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Congratulations on your decision to earn your CCNP certification! As a CCIE, I can tell you that Cisco certifications are both financially and personally rewarding.
To earn your CCNP, you first have to earn your CCNA certification. Then you’re faced with a decision - take the three-exam CCNP path, or the four-exam path? [...]

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 / CCNP Home Lab Tutorial: Planning Ahead For IE Study

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Candidates preparing to pass the CCNP exams are putting together Cisco home labs like never before. With CCNA and CCNP home lab equipment more affordable than ever, candidates have realized the importance of working on real Cisco routers and switches on the way to earning their certifications.
One question I get often from CCNP candidates [...]

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 [...]

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 CCNP / BSCI Exam Tutorial: 10 ISIS Details You Must Know!

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Earning your CCNP certification and passing the BSCI exam depends on knowing the details of many Cisco technologies, ISIS chief among them. To help you prepare for exam success, here’s a list of ISIS terminology and basic concepts that will help you pass this tough exam. Enjoy!
ISIS Terms:
Domain: section of the network under common administrative [...]

Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Using Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP)

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

One of the first things you do when you start studying for the CCNA exam is memorizing a list of port numbers and the protocols that run on those ports. If you’re an experienced networker, you know most of the protocols that are mentioned - DNS, DHCP, FTP, SMTP, and so on. But there’s one [...]