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Network Fundamentals: Top Picks

Network Fundamentals
A MAC address, or Media Access Control address, is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network addres…
Network Fundamentals
In today's world, securing your home network is more important than ever. With the increasing number of cyberattacks, data breaches, and online fraud…
Network Fundamentals
Network Analyzers, also known as Packet Sniffers, are amongst the most popular network tools found inside any Network Engineer’s toolkit. A Network A…
Network Fundamentals
Multicast is a communication method used in computer networking where data is sent from a single sender to a group of destination devices. In this m…

Featured Subcategories:

Netflow Articles:

Netflow
In this article, we explore the core principles of bandwidth management and examine how modern network monitoring technologies can assist in maintain…
Netflow
In our previous article we explained how a Netflow Analyzer can help you gain visibility into your user traffic, application traffic and data flows w…
Netflow
Monitoring network traffic & bandwidth usage via Netflow is mandatory for any type and size network. Gaining visibility into user traffic, applic…
Netflow
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and Netflow are both popular protocols with admins, prized for their ability to give visibility over the ne…

Network Protocols:

TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
As we have seen in the previous pages, some TCP segments carry data while others are simple acknowledgements for previously received data. The popula…
Supernetting & CIDR
This articles build upon our previous pages covering  what is Supernetting (Route Summarization) & How Supernets Work and Supernetting In-De…
IP Protocol
To understand the Internet Protocol, we need to learn and understand Binary. It is very important to know and understand Binary because part of the I…
IP Protocol
This article explains the 'Network-ID' and 'Host-ID' concept found in IP addressing and subnetting. We analyse the structure of IP addresses and netw…
Subnetting
When we subnet a network, we basically split it into smaller networks. For example, when a set of IP Addresses is given to a company, e.g 254 they mi…
Supernetting & CIDR
Our previous article served as an introduction to Supernetting, also known as Route Summarization. We covered the concept of Supernetting, how it wor…
TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
As previously mentioned on a number of occasions, TCP is one of the two protocols that lives at the Transport layer and is used to carry data from on…
TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
Our fifth section contains some very interesting fields that are used by the TCP transport protocol. We see how TCP helps control how much data is tr…

STP/ICMP Protocols:

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)
In this article we will examine the Spanning Tree Bridge ID structure, explain why it has increments of 4096, how VLAN information is embedded (for P…
ICMP Protocol
The ICMP - Source Quench message is one that can be generated by either a gateway or host. You won't see any such message pop up on your workstation…
ICMP Protocol
As mentioned in the previous page, an Echo is simply what we networking engineers call a 'ping'. The Echo Reply is, as most would guess,  the 'p…
ICMP Protocol
The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), is a very popular protocol and actually part of an Internet Protocol (IP) implementation. Because IP wa…

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VLAN Networks
The invention of VLANs was very much welcomed by all engineers and administrators, allowing them to extend, redesign and segment their existing network wi…
VLAN Networks
Dynamic VLANs were introduced to grant the flexibility and complexity(!) that Static VLANs did not provide. Dynamic VLANs are quite rare because of their…
VLAN Networks
It's easy to see why virtual LANs have become extremely popular on networks of all sizes. In practical terms, multiple VLANs are pretty much the same as h…
VLAN Networks
While the VLAN Tagging article briefly covered the IEEE 802.1q protocol this article will continue building upon it by further analyzing the IEEE 802.1q T…

Routing
IGRP (Interior Gateway Routing Protocol) is a Cisco proprietary distance-vector routing protocol used in enterprise networks to exchange routing informati…
Routing
Our previous article explained the purpose of Link State Update (LSU) packets and examined the Link State Advertisement (LSA) information contained within…
Routing
This is the thrid article of our 6-part OSPF series (see below) that describes how OSPF routers perform neighbor relationship and adjacency. We’ll examine…
Routing
This article explains how OSPF uses Link State Advertisement (LSA) to exchange information about the network topology between routers. When a router recei…

Network Address Translation - NAT
Static NAT (also called inbound mapping) is the first mode we're going to talk about and also happens to be the most uncommon between smaller networks. S…
Network Address Translation - NAT
Dynamic NAT is the second NAT mode we're going to talk about. Dynamic NAT, like Static NAT, is not that common in smaller networks but you'll find it used…
Network Address Translation - NAT
NAT Overload is the most common NAT method used throughout all networks that connect to the Internet. This is because of the way it functions and the limi…
Network Address Translation - NAT
In our previous article, Network Address Translation (NAT) Overload - Part 1, we explained what NAT Overload is and how it works. This page deals with the…