CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Tutorial: Assembling Your Cisco Home Lab by Chris Bryant
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! ... The most versatile router you can get for your CCNA / CCNP home lab is a 2520. ... One question I get often from CCNA / CCNP candidates is "What routers should I buy that I can still use when I'm ready to study for the CCNP?" The CCIE lab changes regularly and sometimes drastically when it comes to the equipment you'll need.

Cisco CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam Tutorial: Floating Static Routes by Chris Bryant
Passing the BSCI exam and earning your CCNP certification demands that you add greatly to the networking skills foundation you created when you studied for your CCNA certification. You learned quite a bit about static routing and default static routing when you passed the CCNA test, and it does... When you want to configure a floating static route, you must assign the route an AD higher than that of the primary route. ... One way or the other, 1 and 0 are still less than 110! ... In this case, we've got to create a static route with an AD higher than 110.

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Tutorial: Planning Ahead For IE Study by Chris Bryant
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. ... Again, I know that it's vitally important for today's CCNA and CCNP candidates to get hands-on experience with home labs. ... What kind of routers and switches should I buy now in order to use the same equipment in my CCIE home lab?" This is going to sound strange coming from me, because I'm the...

Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Five OSPF Hub-And-Spoke Details You Must Know! by Chris Bryant
CCNA exam success depends greatly on knowing the details, and if there's one protocol that has a lot of details, it's OSPF! This is true particularly of hub-and-spoke networks, so in this CCNA OSPF tutorial we'll take a look at some of the more important hub-and-spoke OSPF details. ... By configuring the ISDN link as an OSPF demand circuit, the link will drop in the absence of interesting traffic, but the OSPF adjacency that formed across the ISDN link will be assumed by the router to still be up.

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Home Lab Tutorial: The 2520 Router by Chris Bryant
I know from experience that part of the excitement and anxiety of putting together your own CCNA / CCNP home lab is deciding what to buy! While you can make a workable home lab out of almost any combination of Cisco routers and switches, some routers are better suited for home lab work than... (ISDN simulators are physical devices and are plentiful on ebay – they’re no relation to “router simulators”.) Again, I want to reiterate that you can work any Cisco router into a CCNA / CCNP home lab - there's no "right" or "wrong" combination of equipment.

Cisco CCNA Certification: How And Why Switches Trunk by Chris Bryant
Your CCNA studies are going to include quite a bit of information about switches, and for good reason. if you don't understand basic switching theory, you can't configure and troubleshoot Cisco switches, either on the CCNA exam or in the real world. That goes double for trunking! ... Switching theory is a big part of your CCNA studies, and it can seem overwhelming at first. ... There are two major trunking protocols that we need to know the details of for exam success and real-world success, but before we get to the protocols, let's discuss the cables we need.

Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Troubleshooting Directly Connected Serial Interfaces by Chris Bryant
CCNA exam success depends largely on noticing the details, and this is especially true of configurations involving directly connected serial interfaces. And of course, it's not enough to notice these details - you've got to know what to do about them! ... R3#show interface serial 1 Serial1 is up, line protocol is down Troubleshooting is a big part of the job, and it's a big part of the Cisco CCNA and CCNP programs as well. ... If this were your CCNA / CCNP home lab, you could just go over and look at the DTE/DCE cable to see which router had the DCE end of the cable attached.

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Exam Tutorial: Five Debugs You Must Know by Chris Bryant
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... If frame relay mappings are not forming according to your configuration, run "debug frame lmi". ... Let's not ignore Layer Two! ... This debug will allow you to quickly diagnose and correct any LMI mismatches. ... When it comes to PPP, it can be very frustrating to try to spot a problem with a password or...

Cisco CCNA Certification On A Shoestring: Can It Be Done? by Helen Brookes
The answer is a resounding YES!...and this article shows you how. For years, many would-be networking professionals have been put off by the thought of expensive and time-consuming courses, not having access to good quality teachers and mentors and, very importantly, not having access to a... Not-so-new beginners can move on to exam specific searches such as "CCNA certification", "CCNA exam tips", "CCNA tutorials", "Cisco self study", "online training", and the like, to get a feel of the scope of the certification exam.

Cisco CCNA Exam Tutorial: Defining Collision Domains by Chris Bryant
CCNA exam success depends on mastering the fundamentals, and two important fundamentals are knowing exactly what the terms "collision domain" and "broadcast domain" mean. In this free Cisco tutorial, we'll take a look at the term "collision domain" and how a collision domain is defined. ... Passing the CCNA is all about knowing the details of how things work, and knowing CSMA/CD theory and how to define collision domains is one of the many details you've got to master. ... To create smaller collision domains, we'll need to introduce some type of networking device into this example.