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Network Fundamentals: Top Picks

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
A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of a website, server or network by flooding it with traffic…
Network Fundamentals
The term "Broadcast" is used very frequently in the networking world . You will see it in most networking books and articles, or see it happening on…
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
This article will cover the basics of Netflow, including its use cases, Netflow supported devices, Netflow history, and variants. We’ll also dive int…
Netflow
Monitoring network traffic & bandwidth usage via Netflow is mandatory for any type and size network. Gaining visibility into user traffic, applic…
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…

Network Protocols:

TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
This article shows the TCP Header and Segment. We explain where the TCP Header and Segment are located in an Ethernet frame and also briefly view the…
TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
This page will closely examine the Sequence and Acknowledgement numbers. The very purpose of their existence is related directly to the fact that the…
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…
TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
This article covers the UDP protocol. We examine the structure of the UDP header, the protocols that use UDP as a transport plus a lot more. Some co…
Subnetting
Routing and Communication between subnets is the main topic here. This article analyses communications between subnets. We provide examples on differ…
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
This article is an introduction to the 7-page TCP Header analysis section that follows. We briefly view each section of the TCP Header and then move…
Supernetting & CIDR
This articles build upon our previous pages covering  what is Supernetting (Route Summarization) & How Supernets Work and Supernetting In-De…

STP/ICMP Protocols:

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 ICMP - Time Exceeded message is one which is usually created by gateways or routers. In order to fully understand this ICMP message, you must be…
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…
Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)
Spanning Tree Protocol, Rapid STP port costs and port states are an essential part of the STP algorithm that affect how STP decides to forward or blo…

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VLAN Networks
Deciding whether to use ISL or IEEE 802.1q to power your trunk links can be quite confusing if you cannot identify the advantages and disadvantages of eac…
VLAN Networks
This article deals with the popular topic of InterVLAN routing, which is used to allow routing & communication between VLAN networks. Our article anal…
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
VTP (VLAN Trunking Protocol) pruning is a feature that is used in Cisco switches to reduce unnecessary traffic in VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) trunks…

Routing
This article explains how OSPF uses Link State Advertisement (LSA) to exchange information about the network topology between routers. When a router recei…
Routing
Link State routing protocols do not view networks in terms of adjacent routers and hop counts, but they build a comprehensive view of the overall network…
Routing
We are going to analyse what happens when routing occurs on a network (IP routing process). When I was new to the networking area, I thought that all you…
Routing
Distance Vector, Link State RIP, IGRP, EIGRP, OSPF Routing protocols were created for routers. These protocols have been designed to allow the exchange…

Network Address Translation - NAT
Our previous article, Dynamic NAT - Part 1, covered the basic idea of Dynamic Network Address Translation. We are now going to take a closer look at the p…
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
Before we dive into the deep waters of NAT, we need to make sure we understand exactly what NAT does. So let me give you the background of NAT, why it's h…
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…