Certification

[Update 11/28/2020]. Getting certified is the best thing you can do for yourself and your career. Let me list down the Top 10 Network Engineering Certifications to aim for.

Cisco Systems employs over 70,000 people and is best known for routing and switching products that can be found in businesses across the globe.  The networking titan also manages one of the most comprehensive, relevant and respected certification programs in the IT world. Whether you’re new to networking or a …

Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) is a Cisco proprietary default gateway redundancy protocol. If the primary gateway fails, HSRP automatically redirects hosts to the the backup gateway. HSRP has been covered in few RouterFreak’s articles such as: Comparing HSRP vs VRRP How to configure HSRP on a Cisco router First Hop Redundancy …

GNS3 network simulator has become part of the daily work for many network engineers around the world. It became so popular that it even surpassed other network virtualization training solutions. It all started with Dynamips  written by Christophe Fillot in 2005. The software was used for emulation of some of …

When I started my career in computer networking, I wish I knew the best books for Network Engineers. Many people think that nowadays books are obsolete since everything can be googled in few seconds, but online information is sparse and often not reliable. From my experience, there are plenty of differences in …

You can easily rate limit traffic per destination IP address in Junos. We will go through an easy process on how to perform such a task by creating prefix-list, policer and firewall filter. We will have a look at the theoretical background and run a simple test. Rate limiting the …

BGP confederations allow network engineers to manage the complexity and scale of large autonomous systems. BGP confederations can be seen as an alternative to BGP route reflectors, or possibly used together. The focus of this article will be solely on BGP confederation: the basic overview, usage and configuration. Why would you want …

Whether you are an experienced network engineer, or an enthusiast at the beginning of your networking career, I am sure that you have thought at least once about how it would be beneficial to pass one or more of the prestigious Cisco certification exams. Besides your ambition and decision to certify, …

An IP address is a unique identifier for a device connected to a network. It’s a 32 bits number that converted in decimal covers the range 0-4.294.967.296 (i.e. 2 power 32). If the addressing space wasn’t hierarchically organized, it would be possible to connect around 4.3 billions network devices. To simplify the use …

If you decided to read the content of this post, you probably know something (or a lot) about Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and its benefits. Or I might be wrong, and you have heard about this cool protocol numerous times, but just did not figure out how it works. In either …