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To pass the BSCI exam and earn your CCNP certification, you’ve got to master the (many) details of OSPF. You might have thought there were quite a few OSPF details in your CCNA studies, but you’ll now build on that foundation on the way to earning your CCNP.

One such detail is the role of the Autonomous System Border Router (ASBR) in OSPF. The name itself raises some eyebrows, since you learned in your CCNA studies that OSPF doesn’t use autonomous systems! Just as an OSPF Area Border Router borders multiple OSPF areas, the ASBR borders the entire OSPF domain and another source of routes. This can be another dynamic routing protocol, or directly connected networks that are not being advertised into OSPF by the network command.

Let’s say we have a router running both OSPF and RIP version 2. By default, the RIP process will not contain any OSPF-discovered routes, and vice versa. The two separate routing processes are just that – separate. If we want the other OSPF routers to know about the RIP routes, route redistribution must be configured. When the RIP routes are redistributed into OSPF, that router is then an ASBR.

In the below example, RIP subnets have been redistributed into OSPF. A seed metric is not necessary when redistributing routes into OSPF. The command “show ip ospf” confirms that this router is now an ASBR.

R1(config)#router ospf 1

R1(config-router)#redistribute rip subnets

R1#show ip ospf

Routing Process “ospf 1″ with ID 1.1.1.1

Supports only single TOS(TOS0) routes

Supports opaque LSA

It is an autonomous system boundary router

The ASBR can also perform route summarization on the routes being injected into OSPF with the summary-address command. (To configure OSPF inter-area summarization, use the area range command.) By mastering route summarization and route redistribution, you’re well on your way to passing the BSCI exam and earning your CCNP certification!

When you’re getting started on your CCNA studies on your way to earning this certification, you’re swamped with network device types that you’re familiar with, but not quite sure how to use. Let’s look at these networking devices and their main purposes.

Hubs and repeaters operate at Layer One of the OSI model, and they have one main purpose – regenerating the electrical signal that Layer One technologies carry. This regeneration helps to avoid attenuation, the gradual weakening of a signal. Much like a radio signal, the electric signals that travel at Layer One gradually weaken as they travel across the wire. Hubs and repeaters both generate a “clean” copy of the signal.

While hubs and repeaters can be helpful, they do nothing as far as network segmentation is concerned. The first such device we encounter as we move up the OSI model is the switch. Operating at Layer 2, a switch creates multiple collision domains by default each switch port is considered its own little collision domain. If 12 PCs are connected to a Cisco switch, you have 12 separate collision domains.

Switches can be used to segment the network into smaller broadcast domains, but this is not a default behavior. Virtual LAN (VLAN) configuration segments the network into smaller broadcast domains, since a broadcast sent by a host in one VLAN is heard only by other devices in the same VLAN.

Routers operate at Layer 3 of the OSI model and segment a network into multiple broadcast domains by default. Routers do not forward broadcasts as switches do, making the router the only device of the four we’ve discussed today that create multiple broadcast domains by default.

Knowing what each of these devices can and cannot do is essential to passing the CCNA and becoming a great network administrator. Good luck to you in both of these goals!

MCSE stands for Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. What is this term, really? While the term sounds like a degree that you would get in Microsoft, it is not really an engineering degree, per say. In fact, that is one of the biggest complaints about this learning process. Nevertheless, MCSE is a training course of sorts that is designed to teach individuals who want to learn how to handle various aspects of Microsoft skills. The goal is to have a group of people who are knowledgeable in the areas that Microsoft is specific. Let’s explain.

Microsoft developed this type of training to allow individuals to get a specific training course, or several in various types of skills that pertain to Microsoft. The thing about this training is that it is specific to Microsoft. While you may learn to install a program in another course which would teach a broad range of information about all ways in which to do so, in the MSCE, you will learn strictly how it is done through Microsoft.

So, How Does MSCE Work?

In most cases, the training can be done in several ways. Students can take classes through certified teachers in school or they can study on their own. Some individuals feel that they have enough experience in the various uses of Microsoft to be able to take the test without taking a training class. The test is given at specific areas at specific times. In order to be considered, you must pay a fee of about $125 for each of the tests and certifications that you plan to take. The tests range in knowledge levels and in most cases, it is wise to take the training courses for MSCE prior to taking the test as it can be quite challenging.

You will find more information about MSCE throughout the web.

Thomson NETg is one of a kind global learning Enterprise offering live online classrooms and a wide range of Integrated Learning solutions. Their learning offer includes high-quality instructional content, cutting-edge enabling technologies with multiple delivery options, and a full range of expert consulting services.

NETg has been around for 35 years, as a leader in learning and professional development partner of choice for innovating organizations worldwide. Their Integrated Learning solutions are designed to help other companies to unlock the potential of people in their organizations to achieve the results each company needs.

The history of Thomson NETg dates back to 1971 when the company introduced mainframe computer-based training, and by the year 2005 NETg acquired KnowledgeNet, a company leader in live and mobile learning, offering the first viable alternative to classroom-based training.

Nowadays, thousands of government agencies and leading companies all over the world rely on NETg when it comes to achieving performance improvements and important business productivity.

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NETg training area maintains two separate online catalogs, their own NETg Learning Catalog and the following KnowledgeNet catalog after its acquisition:

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In the current job market, Microsoft certifications represent one of the richest and varied spectrums of job roles and responsibilities, which are embraced by industry professionals worldwide, that earning a specific credential provides an objective validation of their ability to successfully perform critical IT functions in a wide range of companies and industries.

Microsoft certification is the top effective way to achieve goals in long-term IT careers, being at the same time a useful tool for companies to develop and retain valuable IT professionals

The following certifications are aimed for network administrators, network engineers, systems administrators, IT engineers, information systems administrators, network technicians, technical support specialists and other IT professionals currently working in complex computing environment of medium-to-large organizations.

- MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certification
A Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer credential qualifies an IT professional to effectively plan, maintain, implement, and support information systems in diverse computing environments using both the Microsoft Windows 2003 Server and the Microsoft .NET integrated family of server products.

To qualify prerequisite is completion of network+ or documentation of equivalent experience for at least one year on Windows 2003, implementing and administering a network operating system

- MCAD (Microsoft Certified Application Developer) certification
The Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) credential provides industry recognition to professional developers who build applications using Microsoft Visual Studio. An MCSD candidate should have experience equivalent to one or two years of deploying, building, and maintaining applications.

This certification is designed for individuals who intend to pursue the skills necessary to develop Windows-based applications using Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft ASP .NET, and for those interested in developing XML Web services-based solutions.

- MCSD (Microsoft Certified Software Developer) certification
The Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) for Microsoft .NET credential is the top-level certification for advanced developers requiring as prerequisite an MCSD for Microsoft .NET and two years of experience developing and maintaining solutions and applications.

This refers to the professional who designs and develops leading-edge enterprise solutions, using Microsoft development tools and technologies including also the Microsoft .NET, a certification to gain the knowledge, skills, and validation needed to be recognized as an expert with Microsoft products and technologies.

- MCSA (Microsoft Certified Systems Analyst) certification
The Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA) credential will provide you with skills to successfully manage, implement, and troubleshoot the needs of Microsoft Windows 2003–based operating environments.

This certification requires a prerequisite completion of network+ or documentation of equivalent experience.

- MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer)
The Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) are technical and instructional experts in Microsoft technologies, products and solutions. They are in charge of Learning Solutions for partners who are required to use a Microsoft Certified Trainer when delivering training using Microsoft Business Solutions courses or official Microsoft Learning products.

Information technology (IT) is the branch of engineering dealing with the use of computers and telecommunications, developing and maintaining systems as well as retrieving, storing and transmitting information. Therefore, any person wanting to develop a career in IT should be aware of the value of IT certifications.

Through education and certification, professionals gain the skills, knowledge, and validation needed to be recognized as an expert in diverse products or technologies. MCSE Certification, CCNA Certification, A+ Certification, and SAP Certification are just a few of the many credentials an IT professional may achieve.

Microsoft certification programs are considered to be the major advancement to gain both professional and education background. There are several Microsoft certifications currently available for both onsite or offsite training; being MCSE Certification, one of the most frequently requested certifications.

The Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification prove an individual’s expertise in designing and implementing the required infrastructure for any type of business solutions based on the Microsoft Windows 2000 platform and Microsoft Windows Server System.

Demand for the network administration job function is another branch of IT, which has grown significantly, the same as candidates applying for this certification, particularly CCNA Certification.

The CCNA certification (Cisco Certified Network Associate) indicates a foundation in apprentice knowledge of networking with certified professionals able to install, configure, and operate WAN, LAN, and dial access services for small networks with 100 nodes or fewer

Operation and configuration services also includes but are not limited to use one but several of the following protocols: Serial, Frame Relay, IP RIP, IP, IGRP, VLANs, RIP, and Ethernet, Access Lists.

IT Certifications in career development add valuable credentials for IT professionals in a competitive industry where a certification for jobs like these is needed at the same time that learning is necessary due to the constant changing business environments

A+ Certification prove the competency of entry-level service technicians in the computer industry and it is an internationally recognized testing program sponsored by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA)

This certification is different from the others because it is not promoted by one company only, but by a whole group of PC manufacturers and other companies in the hardware market and its acceptance as an industry-wide credential offers additional benefits.

The ultimate goal of all IT certifications is in the development of your professional career is validating a specific experience required by the network and systems administrator job role for any small, middle or large company.

SAP Certification is one of the few credentials in the world of business with additional value only issued to those professionals who demonstrated their abilities by passing demanding, process-oriented exams through rigorous study or direct experience.

When you’re studying to pass the CCNA exam and earn your certification, you’re introduced to a great many terms that are either totally new to you or seem familiar, but you’re not quite sure what they are. The term “collision domain” falls into the latter category for many CCNA candidates.

What exactly is “colliding” in the first place, and why do we care? It’s the data that is being sent out onto an Ethernet segment that we’re concerned with here. Ethernet uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access / Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) to avoid collisions in the first place. CSMA/CD is a set of rules dictating when hosts on an Ethernet segment can and cannot transmit data. Basically, a host that wants to transmit data will “listen” to the ethernet segment to see if another host is currently transmitting. If no one else is transmitting, the host will go forward with its own transmission.

This is an effective way of avoiding a collision, but it is not foolproof. If two hosts follow this procedure at the exact same time, their transmissions will collide on the Ethernet segment and both transmissions will become unusable. The hosts that sent those two transmissions will then send a jam signal out onto the segment, indicating to all other hosts that they should not send data. The two hosts will each start a random timer, and at the end of that time each host will begin the listening process again.

Now that we know what a collision is, and what CSMA/CD is, we need to be able to define a collision domain. A collision domain is any area where a collision can theoretically take place, so only one device can transmit at a time in a collision domain.

In another free CCNA certification tutorial, we saw that broadcast domains were defined by routers (default) and switches if VLANs have been defined. Hubs and repeaters did nothing to define broadcast domains. Well, they don’t do anything here, either. Hubs and repeaters do not define collision domains.

Switches do, however. A Cisco switchport is actually its own unshared collision domain! Therefore, if we have 20 host devices connected to separate switchports, we have 20 collision domains. All 20 devices can transmit simultaneously with no danger of collisions. Compare this to hubs and repeaters – if you have five devices connected to a single hub, you still have one large collision domain, and only one device at a time can transmit.

Mastering the definition and creation of collision domains and broadcast domains is an important step toward earning your CCNA and becoming an effective network administrator. Best of luck to you in both these worthwhile pursuits!

When you’re studying for your BSCI exam and CCNP certification, you quickly realize that BGP is a whole new world from anything you’ve previously studies. One topic that sometimes confuses CCNP candidates is when a BGP route reflector needs to be configured.

In the following example, the routers R1, R2, and R3 are all in BGP AS 100. This is not a full mesh, however. There are peer relationships between R1-R2 and R1-R3, but not between R2 and R3. R3 is advertising network 3.3.3.0/24 via BGP, and the route is seen on R1. R1′s iBGP neighbor, R2 does not see the route.

A basic rule of BGP is that a BGP speaker cannot advertise a route to an iBGP neighbor if that route was learned from another iBGP neighbor. Configuring R1 as a route reflector will allow us to circumvent this rule. The entire route reflector process is transparent to the clients, and no configuration is necessary on those clients. We’ll configure R1 as a route reflector for both R2 and R3.

R1(config)#router bgp 100

R1(config-router)#neighbor 172.12.123.2 route-reflector-client

3d18h: %BGP-5-ADJCHANGE: neighbor 172.12.123.2 Down RR client config change

R1(config-router)#neighbor 172.12.123.3 route-reflector-client

3d18h: %BGP-5-ADJCHANGE: neighbor 172.12.123.3 Down RR client config change

The BGP adjacencies do come down when this configuration is added, so this isn’t something you want to do during a peak traffic time.

Once the adjacencies come back up, R2 will have the route to 3.3.3.0/24.

There are other possible solutions to this iBGP limitation, such as configuring BGP confederations. Those solutions are generally used on larger BGP deployments and with other concerns in mind, though, and configuring route reflectors serves this purpose just as well.

In the first part of this free CCNP / BSCI tutorial, we looked at how leaving one simple word out of our route redistribution configuration – “subnets” – resulted in an incomplete routing table when redistributing routes from RIP to OSPF. (If you missed that part of the tutorial, visit my website’s “Free Tutorials” section.) Today, we’ll look at redistributing OSPF routes into RIP and identify another common redistribution error.

We are using a three-router network. R5 is running RIP, R1 is serving as a hub between R5 and R3 and is running RIP and OSPF, and R3 is running OSPF.

To begin this lab, we’ll add three loopbacks to R3 and advertise them to R1 via OSPF.

R3(config)#int loopback33

R3(config-if)#ip address 33.3.3.3 255.255.255.255

R3(config-if)#int loopback34

R3(config-if)#ip address 34.3.3.3 255.255.255.255

R3(config-if)#int loopback35

R3(config-if)#ip address 35.3.3.3 255.255.255.255

R3(config-if)#router ospf 1

R3(config-router)#network 33.3.3.3 0.0.0.0 area 1

R3(config-router)#network 34.3.3.3 0.0.0.0 area 1

R3(config-router)#network 35.3.3.3 0.0.0.0 area 1

R1 sees all three of these routes in its routing table.

R1#show ip route ospf

34.0.0.0/32 is subnetted, 1 subnets

O IA 34.3.3.3 [110/65] via 172.12.123.3, 00:00:55, Serial0

35.0.0.0/32 is subnetted, 1 subnets

O IA 35.3.3.3 [110/65] via 172.12.123.3, 00:00:45, Serial0

33.0.0.0/32 is subnetted, 1 subnets

O IA 33.3.3.3 [110/65] via 172.12.123.3, 00:00:55, Serial0

We’ll now redistribute these routes into RIP on R1. Remember the “subnets” option we talked about in the first part of this tutorial? There is no such option when redistributing OSPF routes into RIP, as IOS Help shows us.

R1(config)#router rip

R1(config-router)#redistribute ospf 1 ?

match Redistribution of OSPF routes

metric Metric for redistributed routes

route-map Route map reference

vrf VPN Routing/Forwarding Instance

R1(config-router)#redistribute ospf 1

The routes have been redistributed into RIP with the redistribute ospf 1 command. (The “1″ is the OSPF process number.) Let’s look at R5 and see the results.

R5#show ip route rip

R5#

The routes aren’t there, but we didn’t get a warning from the router that we needed to do anything else. What is the problem?

The problem is that RIP requires a seed metric to be specified when redistributing routes into that protocol. A seed metric is a “starter metric” that gives the RIP process a metric it can work with. The OSPF metric of cost is incomprehensible to RIP, since RIP’s sole metric is hop count. We’ve got to give RIP a metric it understands when redistributing routes into that protocol, so let’s go back to R1 and do so.

R1(config)#router rip

R1(config-router)#no redistribute ospf 1

R1(config-router)#redistribute ospf 1 metric 2

R5 now sees the routes. Note that the metric contained in the brackets is the seed metric.

R5#show ip route rip

34.0.0.0/32 is subnetted, 1 subnets

R 34.3.3.3 [120/2] via 100.1.1.1, 00:00:24, Ethernet0

35.0.0.0/32 is subnetted, 1 subnets

R 35.3.3.3 [120/2] via 100.1.1.1, 00:00:24, Ethernet0

33.0.0.0/32 is subnetted, 1 subnets

R 33.3.3.3 [120/2] via 100.1.1.1, 00:00:24, Ethernet0

If you read the previous tutorial, you may have noticed that we did not specify a seed metric for OSPF. OSPF does not require a seed metric to be set during redistribution. You also noticed that the router did tell us that there might be a problem when we left the “subnets” option out of RIP>OSPF redistribution, but the router didn’t tell us anything about a seed metric when we performed OSPF>RIP redistribution. This is a detail you must know by heart in order to make your route redistribution successful!

When you’re studying to pass the CCNA exam and earn your certification, you’re introduced to a great many terms that are either totally new to you or seem familiar, but you’re not quite sure what they are. The term “broadcast domain” falls into the latter category for many CCNA candidates.

A broadcast domain is simply the group of end hosts that will receive a broadcast sent out by a given host. For example, if there are ten host devices connected to a switch and one of them sends a broadcast, the other nine devices will receive the broadcast. All of those devices are in the same broadcast domain.

Of course, we probably don’t want every device in a network receiving every single broadcast sent out by any other device in the network! This is why we need to know what devices can create multiple, smaller broadcast domains. Doing so allows us to limit the broadcasts traveling around our network – and you might be surprised how much traffic on some networks consists of unnecessary broadcasts.

Using the OSI model, we find devices such as hubs and repeaters at Layer One. This is the Physical layer, and devices at this layer have no effect on broadcast domains.

At Layer Two, we’ve got switches and bridges. By default, a switch has no effect on broadcast domains; CCNA candidates know that a switch will forward a broadcast out every single port on that switch except the one upon which it was received. However, Cisco switches allow the creation of Virtual Local Area Networks, or VLANs, that are logical segments of the network. A broadcast sent by one host in a VLAN will not be forwarded out every other port on the switch. That broadcast will be forwarded only out ports that are members of the same VLAN as the host device that sent it.

The good news is that broadcast traffic will not be forwarded between VLANs. The bad news is that no inter-VLAN traffic at all is allowed by default! You may actually want this in some cases, but generally you’re going to want inter-VLAN traffic. This requires the use of a router or other Layer 3 device such as a Layer 3 Switch. (Layer 3 Switches are becoming more popular every day. Basically, it’s a switch that can also run routing protocols. These switches are not tested on the CCNA exam.)

That router we just talked about also defines broadcast domains. Routers do not forward broadcasts, so broadcast domains are defined by routers with no additional configuration.

Knowing how broadcasts travel across your network, and how they can be controlled, is an important part of being a CCNA and of being a superior network administrator. Best of luck to you in both of these pursuits!