Subnetting is the art of creating two or more subnets out of a single network address. In these lessons you will learn how to do subnetting in binary or decimal and how to become really fast at it. You will also learn how to calculate hexadecimal addresses which is useful for IPv6.
RIP (Routing Information Protocol) is an old distance vector routing protocol. It uses a hop count as its metric, which is limited to a maximum of 15 routers. There are two versions of RIP, version 1 and 2. Even though it’s not commonly used anymore, it is a still a great routing protocol to start with if you are new to networking.
EIGRP (Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol) is Cisco’s IGP (Interior Gateway Protocol) that was made an “open standard” in 2013. It is a distance vector routing protocol similar to RIP but has many advanced features. In these lessons, we start with the basics of EIGRP and end with the most advanced topics.
OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) is a popular link-state routing protocol. Routers exchange pieces of information called LSAs (link state advertisement) and build a topology database which we call the LSDB (link state database). In these lessons, we start with the basics and work our way through the most advanced OSPF topics.
IS-IS is a link-state routing protocol similar to OSPF. It has different areas, multiple neighbor adjacency types and uses its own CLNS addresses, which is ISO’s equivalent of IP. In these lessons, you will learn what the IS-IS link-state routing protocol is and how it is different from OSPF. We start with the basics and then move on to more advanced topics like route leaking, etc.
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the routing protocol of the Internet, used to route traffic from one autonomous system (AS) to another. It’s an important topic to understand if you work at an ISP or at a large company that is connected to two or more ISPs. Unlike IGPs like OSPF or EIGRP, BGP uses a set of attributes to determine the best path for each destination.
Sending traffic from one source to a single destination is called unicast. Sending traffic from one source to everyone in the subnet is called a broadcast. Sending traffic from one (or multiple) sources to a group of receivers is called multicast. These lessons explain the different protocols we require to make multicast work on our routers and switches.
IPv6 is the successor of IPv4 and the main reason we need it is because we are running out of IPv4 address space. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and offered us about 4.3 billion addresses, IPv6 offers 128-bit addresses so we have a huge amount of available addresses. These lessons will explain the basics of IPv6 and how to configure it on Cisco IOS routers.
Network devices don’t really care what kind of traffic they are forwarding…to them, it’s all “best effort”. With QoS (Quality of Service), we can prioritize, queue, limit, or filter different traffic types and applications. This allows you to enforce business requirements on your network. These lessons explain the basics of QoS and how to implement it on your network.
MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) is a mechanism that switches traffic based on labels instead of routing traffic. It’s typically seen in service provider networks and can transport pretty much everything…IP, IPv6, Ethernet, frame-relay, PPP. MPLS VPN is a popular technique to build VPNs for customers over the MPLS provider network.