I have seen a lot of people ask the question how can they easily generate multicast traffic on their Cisco home lab when studying for the BSCI. One way I’ve seen is to stream videos across your network. This is fine, but there is a much easier way.
Nortel has a tool called Multicast Hammer (aka [...]

I see this question all the time. I don’t have a lot of computer experience and I’ve heard the CCNA is a great program to help me get a job. What should I do to get my CCNA?
If you are really new to IT, then I’ll tell you right up front, the CCNA is hard. [...]

One of the really cool things about Cisco IOS is the ability to move around the file system as if it was a standard unix operating system. I decided it might help a new CCNA if they knew what those commands were and how they worked.
1. cd
cd is one of the easiest commands to use. [...]

As a Cisco network engineer, I am constantly searching Cisco.com for Configuration info or checking out the latest equipment features. I don’t mind going to the website, but sometimes it is easier to search directly from my browser.
I tried searching, but it doesn’t look like anyone has done this yet. Being a resourceful lad, I [...]

When you are working on your CCNA or even CCNP for that matter, you find yourself saving the config all the time. The one thing that always annoyed me is how the pause will create additional characters and text in your saved file. If you are like me, you get tired of hitting the space [...]

So you want to get your CCNA and you need to buy a router for your CCNA home lab? Now the question is which router should you get? I have been in your shoes and know when you are just starting out, it is tough to make sense of all the different models of Cisco [...]

I was setting up a new ASA the other day and ran into a problem that drove me nuts. I’ve configured local access on tons of switches and routers, but this is the first time I had to configure access to a firewall from scratch. I thought I would share my experiences in case anyone [...]

If you’ve read my original post on Gigabit Autonegotiation, you already know how I feel. Today, this hit me smack dab in the face. We were on a conference call with EMC. We are about to install a very expensive EMC NAS and were going over all the settings and details.
Right there on the worksheet, [...]

WoW! I really didn’t see this coming. While surfing the Cisco website, I stumbled onto some information regarding the new Cisco CCNA tests. Rather than bore you with the details, I will highlight some of the things I found.
There are three new tests:
CCNA Security 640-553 IINS
CCNA VoIP 640-460 IIUC
CCNA Wireless 640-721 IUWNE
While they are CCNA [...]

Repeat after me. I will not force a switch to 1000/Full, even if some idiot insists that I should.
Now we have that out of the way, let me give you a little background. I’ve had two instances where a “network” admin/engineer argued with me about hard coding Gigabit settings on a switch and server to [...]