You will need to become familiar with how wildcard masks work in order to properly configure many different Cisco IOS commands. Mostly you will encounter wildcard masks with access control lists and when configuring the dynamic routing protocol OSPF. ACL’s are also used when configuring NAT and PAT settings. Because wildcard masks come up often they are a very important topic to understand for your ICND2 and CCNA Exam.

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Access Control Lists are very important to ensure that network traffic is well managed and under control. Just like a toll both checks every car before it proceeds on the highway, Access Control Lists can be set up on a router to check each and every packet as it comes through and block unwanted traffic.

A proper Access Control List configuration will increase security and ensure proper network speeds for time sensitive traffic like voice calls or video conferences.

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EIGRP stands for Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol. It is considered a hybrid routing protocol because it uses features from both link-state and distance vector routing protocols.

EIGRP is a Cisco proprietary routing protocol. Meaning that it can only run on Cisco routers.

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I think static routes get trash talked a lot by those studying for their CCNA exam. Mostly likely because they are just learning about dynamic routing for the first time and find it really fun to set up. And from that moment on static routes get pushed to the back burner and never make it into the router configuration. While static routes may have some disadvantages they also have many advantages that are worth considering.

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My last post talked about many details of the Spanning Tree Protocol. While I did my best to explain how it works using carefully selected words, sometimes videos are just better.

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I’m currently studying for my CCNP SWITCH exam. Which is obviously all about switches, but mostly builds upon the foundation of the ICND2 and CCNA exam about switches and the Spanning Tree Protocol. So, if you are planning on getting your CCNP definitley make sure you pay attention to STP (Spanning Tree Protocol for short), you will need to know a lot about it.

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Now that we are finally to Part 3 of the Router OSPF Series its time to have some fun configuring OSPF. I even made a video showing you how to configure a two area OSPF implementation!

If you still havn’t read Part 1 or Part 2 yet please do so that you understand some OSPF fundamentals.

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This is Part 2 of the Router OSPF Series which will cover topics about OSPF Areas and OSPF LSA’s. Before continuing on I recommend reading Part 1 of the Router OSPF Series which gives an introduction on the topic.

For the ICND2 and CCNA exam you will only need to configure a single area OSPF implementation, but you will still be required to know many different things about a full multi-area OSPF network.

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Router OSPF is the command used to enable OSPF routing on a Cisco router. But before we get into the command syntax I want to give you a brief summary of some important OSPF details for the ICND2 and CCNA Exam.

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It can be pretty daunting to go back and flip through hundreds of pages in a book to help you review for the ICND2 Exam, so I decided to make a quick little review sheet of important commands and terms. Having a sheet that is quick and easy to read can really help you review [...]