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Network Fundamentals: Top Picks

Network Fundamentals
Power over Ethernet (PoE) was invented by PowerDsine back in 1997 and the first power injector (Midspan) was installed in 1998! Many manufacturespart…
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 network is simply a group of two or more Personal Computers linked together. Many types of networks exist, but the most common types of networks ar…
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…

Featured Subcategories:

Netflow Articles:

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…
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…

Network Protocols:

TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
Finally, the last page of our incredible TCP Analysis. As most of you would expect, this section is dedicated to the DATA section that follows the TC…
Subnetting
This free online Subnet Calculator provides a fast and easy way to calculate all aspects of any IP Address and Subnet Mask. Simply enter your desir…
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…
Subnetting
There are a few different ways to approach subnetting and it can get confusing because of the complexity of some subnets and the flexibility they off…
Domain Name System (DNS)
The previous article covered the DNS Query message formats. In the article we analysed them in great detail and showed how various options are select…
Subnetting
Routing and Communication between subnets is the main topic here. This article analyses communications between subnets. We provide examples on differ…
Supernetting & CIDR
This articles build upon our previous pages covering  what is Supernetting (Route Summarization) & How Supernets Work and Supernetting In-De…
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…

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…
Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)
One of the most used terms in network is LAN (Local Area Network). It’s a form of network that we encounter in our daily lives, at home, at work, stu…
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
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
VLANs are usually created by the network administrator, assigning each port of every switch to a VLAN. Depending on the network infrastructure and securit…
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
The previous article introduced the VTP protocol, we examined how it can be used within a network, to help manage VLANs and ease the administrative overhe…

Routing
Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), similar to IGRP, is a Cisco proprietary routing protocol that is used to exchange routing information…
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
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…

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…
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
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
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…