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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 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
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
Next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) and DMZ zones are two critical components of network security that work hand in hand to protect an organization's n…

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

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
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…
IP Protocol
This article explains the 'Network-ID' and 'Host-ID' concept found in IP addressing and subnetting. We analyse the structure of IP addresses and netw…
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…
Subnetting
There is always that day when you are called upon to provide a solution to a network problem. The number of problems that can occur in a network are…
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…
Subnetting
So we have covered to some depth the subnetting topic, but there is still much to learn ! We are going to explain here the available subnet masks and…

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 - Redirect Message is always sent from a gateway to the host and the example below will illustrate when this is used. Putting it simply (be…
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…
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…

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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…
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…
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…

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
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
IGRP (Interior Gateway Routing Protocol) is a Cisco proprietary distance-vector routing protocol used in enterprise networks to exchange routing informati…
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…

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
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
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
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…