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Network Fundamentals: Top Picks

Network Fundamentals
The first step in controlling broadcast and multicast traffic is to identify which devices are involved in a broadcast or multicast storm. The follow…
Network Fundamentals
A long-long time ago (not long ago in earth time) 100 Mbps was THE technology. 100 Mbps uplinks bundled with ether-channel was the ultimate uplink te…
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
Unicast is a communication method used in computer networking where data is sent from a single sender to a specific destination device. In this…

Featured Subcategories:

Netflow Articles:

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
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
Monitoring network traffic & bandwidth usage via Netflow is mandatory for any type and size network. Gaining visibility into user traffic, applic…

Network Protocols:

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…
TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
Understanding how each protocol fits into the OSI Model is essential for any network engineer. This page analyses how TCP is classified as a 'transpo…
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…
Domain Name System (DNS)
This section will deal with the analysis of the DNS packets by examining how DNS messages are formatted and the options and variables they contain. T…
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…
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 page will closely examine the Sequence and Acknowledgement numbers. The very purpose of their existence is related directly to the fact that the…
Domain Name System (DNS)
This section will help you understand how the DNS queries work on the Internet and your home network. There are two ways to use the domain name syste…

STP/ICMP Protocols:

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)
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…
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…

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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
If you've read our previous article The VLAN Concept - Introduction to VLANs  then you should feel comfortable with terms such as 'VLAN', 'Stati…
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…
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…

Routing
This article covers basic OSPF concepts and operation. We explain how OSPF works, how OSPF tables are built on an OSPF-enabled router and their purpose (N…
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
Hybrid routing protocols are a combination of distance-vector and link-state routing protocols, and are used to provide a more efficient and scalabl…
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
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
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
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…
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…