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Network Fundamentals: Top Picks

Network Fundamentals
Network topologies can take a bit of time to understand when you're all new to this kind of cool stuff, but it's very important to fully understand t…
Network Fundamentals
Measuring network performance has always been a difficult and unclear task, mainly because most engineers and administrators are unsure which approac…
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
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…

Featured Subcategories:

Netflow Articles:

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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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
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…
TCP - UDP Protocol Analysis
Our fifth section contains some very interesting fields that are used by the TCP transport protocol. We see how TCP helps control how much data is tr…

STP/ICMP Protocols:

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…
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…
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 'ICMP Destination unreachable' message is quite interesting, because it doesn't actually contain one message, but infact six! This means that the…

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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
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
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 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
Our previous article explained the purpose of Link State Update (LSU) packets and examined the Link State Advertisement (LSA) information contained within…
Routing
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a popular routing protocol developed for Internet Protocol (IP) networks by the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) working…
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…

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
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
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
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…