As part of securing a network, access to your devices needs to be restricted and monitored. This includes direct access to routers, switches and servers but it can extend to allowing users to log on to particular services such as logging on to your ISP. It would be a tedious task if, for example, on …
Read More »Understanding Ethernet Jumbo Frames
There seems to be a growing argument lately over network optimization and the use of Jumbo Frames. With the cost of Gigabit networking continuing to go down, and 10 Gigabit (and greater) networks becoming more affordable, the impact of this decision is becoming more and more important. Knowing how and …
Read More »Wireless Networking Basics
An Introduction to Wireless Networking Standards Way back in the early days of Wireless LAN (WLAN) development, there were a whole lot of folks trying different types of technologies to get wireless LAN communications to work. Eventually some clear winners started to rise to the top and it was seen …
Read More »The Many Faces of Link Aggregation
If any technology in networking had identity issues, it would have to be Link Aggregation. This simple process can never seem to make up its mind what it wants to be called. Link aggregation is the process of combining two or more connections into a larger pipe to allow …
Read More »Meet the ARP Family – ARP, inARP, GARP and RARP
What is ARP? ARP or Address Resolution Protocol is a simple communications protocol used primarily today in IP and Ethernet networks. It’s main purpose is to discover and associate IP addresses to physical MAC hardware addresses. How does ARP work? When a computer needs to send data across a network …
Read More »Using PING to Troubleshoot Network Problems
Problem Diagnosis With Ping By Steve Waddington The two most used tools, and almost always the first used to diagnose a network problem are traceroute and ping. The results they return are however most often misunderstood or interpreted in a way that leads to an incorrect conclusion. Let’s take the …
Read More »What are Routing Protocols?
Network Routing Protocols – IGRP, EIGRP, OSPF, ISIS, BGP The purpose of routing protocols is to learn of available routes that exist on the enterprise network, build routing tables and make routing decisions. Some of the most common routing protocols include RIP, IGRP, EIGRP, OSPF, IS-IS and BGP. There are …
Read More »IPv4 versus IPv6 :: Understanding : Their : Basic : Differences
Most businesses and networks today use IPv4 as their network addressing standard. With the exception of some DoD and government agencies few people have adopted IPv6. But what is so different about IPv6 versus IPv4? In this post we compare the differences between IPv6 and IPv4 and review some of …
Read More »There can be only one – Root Bridge
Spanning Tree and Switches are a lot like the Highlander – “there can be only one” (root bridge in your spanning tree). The process of electing a root bridge is very similar to Highlander in that switches will battle it out until one bridge is the root. And all designated …
Read More »Broadcast Domains – Routing Between Segments
As your network begins to grow you start to see a need to logically separate different parts of your network into different broadcast domains. But what is a broadcast domains and how is it different from a collision domains? And how do I get two different broadcast domains to talk …
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