SEC & SYS MGMT

Access-Lists are fundamentals to today’s network as they provide basic packet filtering at the interface level. The router basically inspects each incoming or outgoing packet to determine whether to forward it or drop it per the configuration of the ACL (Access-List). While one of the many reasons to leverage the use of ACLs in today’s [ Read More ]

Access-Lists are fundamentals to today’s network as they provide basic packet filtering at the interface level. The router basically inspects each incoming or outgoing packet to determine whether to forward it or drop it per the configuration of the ACL (Access-List). While one of the many reasons to leverage the use of ACLs in today’s [ Read More ]

Conventional network security often focuses more on ACLs blocking traffic either inbound or outbound but Cisco switches do have the capability to secure switchports for inbound traffic by pinpointing and limiting ingress packets based on source Ethernet Mac Addresses. This is huge as now we can control at an even more granular level who gets [ Read More ]

The term “Storm” in Networking refers to packets flooding a specific broadcast domain which ultimately results in poor network performance. Cisco came up with a solution to mitigate such detrimental scenarios and it’s called “Storm Control” sometimes referred to as “Traffic Suppression”. As the name implies, it basically monitors incoming traffic levels every second and compare it with a [ Read More ]

The archive feature in Cisco IOS provides an automation mechanism in terms of saving configuration files either locally on the box or to a remote location. This is extremely useful in a corporate environment with many Network Engineers onsite. There could be times where unplanned downtime occurs and the inspection of the running config for any [ Read More ]

Cisco Embedded Event Manager (EEM) is a scripting and automation mechanism within the IOS that triggers specific actions in response to network events. It is a flexible and robust tool which can provide scalable solution to given scenarios. It is composed with 2 pieces: -Applets which a collection of CLI commands -Scripting which are defined using [ Read More ]

NTP is a protocol designed to basically time synchronize network devices across Local or Wide Area Networks. You would probably guess how critical this is in terms of troubleshooting as it would greatly assist in pinpointing time events and help isolate the root cause of a problem. On top of that, certain network devices need [ Read More ]