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Cisco Skills

  • 5 min read

How a Router Routes

This tutorial will be going over the basic information of how a router routes IP packets. Routers are used in the OSI layer three or the network layer. These routers have IP addresses and forward IP packets to the proper destination. This guide is somewhat basic and is assuming you have some information of how IP addressing works and along with what routing protocols are. So let's focus first on how a host or a computer forwards traffic and then look at how a router forwards traffic. Computers forward or send packets based on these two steps.

  • 3 min read

Cracking WEP

BackTrack is Linux  network security audit tool for security professionals. This tool is used for testing and penetrating networks. That being said** This tutorial is for educational use only. This is meant only to teach that WEP is an insecure option, and is recommend to use a harder encryption. Using this tutorial on a network that you do not have permission to access or is not yours, could be illegal! ** This was tested on BackTrack version 4 and the steps outlined in this tutorial were successful. (this tutorial is assuming that you have BackTrack 4 installed and are ready with a shell prompt)

  • 3 min read

Telecommuting Services

This post is going to talk about the major technologies that make Teleworking or also called telecommuting possible. This is when an employee performs his or her job away from the office, usually from their home office. By doing this it allows personal convenience, less travel to and from the workplace. At an Organization level it provides continuity of operations, Secure, reliable and manageable access to information, cost-effective integration of data, voice, video and applications. Broadband refers to advance communications systems that can offer high-speed transmission of services, such as data, voice, and video over the internet.

  • 3 min read

Crossover or Straight through?

The EIA/TIA puts the standards in UTP cable, and when cabling a network there are two standards. T568A and T568B these standards are important when deciding to put a crossover cable or straight through cable This tutorial is going to be talking about when and where to apply these different standards. We are going to be focusing on the UTP cable and with the RJ-45 connectors; in order for the communication to work properly we need to make sure we understand where to put these cables.

  • 3 min read

Cisco IDS vs. IPS

There are tons of network attacks out there. Using a firewall helps but does look for signature based attacks. Access Control Lists are like firewalls and only look at the protocols like HTTP, FTP POP, etc. Cisco has developed some tools that will help network administrators combat the issue; IDS, (Intrusion Detection System) and IPS. (Intrusion Prevention System) Let's go into IDS first, Cisco IDS is a physical device and is like an alarm system it will alert you when an attack happens but that's it, the system won't block the connection. The IDS system is deployed in promiscuous mode meaning the sensor is placed where it can hear all the network traffic but is not in direct connect with the network making it an advantage when using an IDS:

  • 3 min read

Laser Printing Process

Let's move away from Cisco for at least a day, So this post will be talking about the six steps in the laser printing process, this is good for technicians who fix or repair printers along with a good learning experience. With my limited knowledge of printers I used this process to at least help diagnose the problem. 

  • 2 min read

WordPress.com Hit by a DoS Attack

Yesterday, (March 3rd 2011) there was a massive DoS attack that hit WordPress.com. Cisco Skill's uses WordPress.com has a hosting provider but is not believed to one of the sites hit. There still is no word on who or why they targeted WordPress.com but goes to show that Denial of Service is still a popular type of attack and although simple to set up they can still bring down enterprise networks.

  • 3 min read

Understanding TCP

This tutorial is going to be talking about the TCP protocol. Every time you connect to a website you are using the HTTP protocol, but below that you are also using a TCP protocol. The nature of TCP is to provide error recovery; there are other services or applications that use TCP. HTTP however is a common protocol that is used in online applications.  Remember TCP is not the only protocol in the transport layer of the OSI model, there is another called UDP but that's another day. :)