The CCIE has been around since August 1993 and a lot has happened within the last 17 years. One big thing that has changed is that now there is actual curriculum to study and courses that you can take. That just didn’t exist 17 years ago. There was no book to study from, you had to learn everything from experience working for many years in the Networking Field.  Now because Cisco offers courses you can take as part of your high school curriculum  you have 18 year old CCNA’s who get their certification before they even graduate and have a job. Like me! I was fortunate to work for a VOIP company while still in high school which helped me tremendously get my certification. Then college happens, while many universities offer some networking classes they usually are just Associate degrees which in my opinion doesn’t mean much any more.

There have been several questions that I have always had about getting a college degree and balancing that with getting Cisco Certifications. And since I’m not as experienced as many other people out there I decided to ask the experts what they thought. I was really impressed with their replies and I would love to share them with you.

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Many networks these days are still using IPv4 and are not yet ready for IPv6 and so in this article I wanted to talk about the necessary steps to start the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 addressing. A while back I wrote a general introduction to IPv6 addressing that you should look at again to get a little bit more background.

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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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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 [...]