Everything mapped to the CCNA 200-301 blueprint. Articles tagged CCNA cover the exam topics in the order you actually learn them, each one backed by a lab you can build yourself.
Sooner or later every engineer copies something onto or off a router: a config backup before a risky change, a new IOS image, a crash dump for TAC. The two classic transports are TFTP and FTP, they behave very differently,
DHCP hands a host its network identity; DNS makes names usable instead of addresses. The CCNA asks you to keep their roles straight and to configure a router as a DHCP server and relay, and the relay part is where
When something breaks at 3 a.m., the first question is "what changed, and when?" Syslog is the answer, but only if you set it up before the outage: severity levels chosen deliberately, messages shipped off-box to
SNMP is how monitoring systems actually know your interface went down, your CPU spiked, or your optics are running hot. Every NMS you will ever deploy (LibreNMS, Zabbix, SolarWinds, Catalyst Center's assurance features) speaks it. This article explains
Wrong time on a network device is not a cosmetic problem. Certificate validation fails, log timestamps become useless for incident correlation, and time-based authentication (like 802.1X with certificates, or API tokens) starts breaking in ways that look random.
NAT is the reason your private 10.x network can talk to the internet, and it is also one of the CCNA topics where the terminology trips up more people than the configuration. Cisco IOS XE gives you three flavors:
The CCNA v1.1 refresh added artificial intelligence and machine learning to the blueprint, and it is one of the few topics where the competition has not caught up yet. You are not expected to build models; you are expected
Once you accept that configuring devices one at a time does not scale, the next question is which tool does the configuring for you. The CCNA v1.1 blueprint names three configuration-management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef) and, with the
The command line is a conversation for humans. REST APIs are the conversation for programs, and once a controller sits in front of your network (see Controller-Based Networking and SDN), REST is how your scripts, dashboards, and automation tools
For most of networking history, every router and switch was an island: it made its own forwarding decisions and you configured each one by hand. Controller-based networking breaks that model by pulling the decision-making into a central controller,
Every network device ships with the same weakness: a login prompt that will accept a guessed password forever unless you tell it not to. Hardening that prompt is a CCNA domain 5 objective and a real-world necessity, and it
CCNA domain 5 opens with a set of definitions that sound interchangeable but are not: threat, vulnerability, exploit, mitigation. The exam tests whether you can keep them straight, and the real world punishes you when you can't, because