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Network Fundamentals: Top Picks

Network Fundamentals
Network data transmission refers to the process of sending and receiving information between two or more devices connected to a network. It is a crit…
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
Measuring network performance has always been a difficult and unclear task, mainly because most engineers and administrators are unsure which approac…

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
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and Netflow are both popular protocols with admins, prized for their ability to give visibility over the ne…
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…

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…
Domain Name System (DNS)
If you ever wondered where DNS came from, this is your chance to find out ! The quick summary on DNS's history will also help you understand why DNS…
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…
Supernetting & CIDR
Supernetting is the opposite of of subnetting, and is also known as route aggregation or CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing). Supernetting is a tec…
TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
The third field under close examination is the TCP Header length. There really isn't that much to say about the Header length other than to explain w…
Supernetting & CIDR
This articles build upon our previous pages covering  what is Supernetting (Route Summarization) & How Supernets Work and Supernetting In-De…
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…
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…

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…
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 Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), is a very popular protocol and actually part of an Internet Protocol (IP) implementation. Because IP wa…
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
We mentioned that Trunk Links are designed to pass frames (packets) from all VLANs, allowing us to connect multiple switches together and independently co…
VLAN Networks
We hear about them everywhere, vendors around the world are constantly trying to push them into every type of network and as a result, the Local Area Netw…
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…

Routing
This is the third article of our OSPF series which analyzes the different OSPF States routers go through during the OSPF discovery and neighbor forming pr…
Routing
Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is a distance-vector routing protocol that is commonly used in small to medium-sized networks. It is one of the o…
Routing
We all understand that TCP/IP, IPX-SPX are protocols which are used in a Local Area Network (LAN) so computers can communicate between with each other and…
Routing
Distance Vector routing protocols use frequent broadcasts (255.255.255.255 or FF:FF:FF:FF) of their entire routing table every 30 sec. on all their interf…

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
The previous page (Static NAT - Part 1) helped us understand what exactly happens with Static NAT and how it works, and we saw a few examples of how to us…
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
After that simple and informative introduction to the NAT concept, it's time to find out more about how it works and this is where the NAT table comes in…