George Batey's blog: "certificationkey"

CCNA is the second level certification in the Cisco career certification process; this course includes the basic aspect of Local Area Network (LAN) such as installation, configuration, operation, and troubleshooting of mid-size route and switched networks, also including implementation and authentication of connections to remote sites in a Wide Area Network (WAN). CCIE Certification Training acknowledges networking professionals’ ability in planning, implementation, verification and troubleshooting of LAN and WAN. CCNP certified professionals also work closely with experts on highly developed networking security, voice, wireless and video solutions. Both CCNA and CCNP certifications are generally offered to networking professionals having at least 1 year of practical experience in networking. In order to cope with the dynamic changing taking place in IT industry and Cisco, one has to understand what new courses or subjects are being added to the current Cisco certifications. For example, the new course outline of the CCNA certification includes the use of protocol frame relay. When you start studying for Cisco CCNA or CCNP certifications you have to keep in mind that you have to learn a lot of things. These exams are accepted worldwide and you may have to include those topics into your study that are often ignored. For example, one of the commonly overlooked topics is Frame Relay, the encapsulation type. Frame Relay is currently the most used technology for voice and data by using encapsulation methods between LANs and over a WAN. In an established network Frame Relay is often fixed and you don’t change it frequently. It’s a hidden path for end users and a sudden change in those paths may result an end to you job but still it’s an important part of networking. The DCE (Distributed Computing Environment) and DTE (Data terminal equipment) work only if they share same type of LMI (Local Management Interface), however the two end points o the VC network i.e. DTEs (Data terminal equipments) should also share the same value. While setting up a network the initial value of the frame relay encapsulation if often the Cisco default property but if required it can also be changed according to the industry-standards of IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) as shown below. However if you are using a router that is not from Cisco line of products then it’s a requirement that you use frame relay encapsulation value as provided by IETF. Remember the default value of the Cisco is not included in the in the Cisco IOS (Cisco Internetwork Operating System) help section so you have to memorize it. R1(config)#int s0 R1(config-if)#encap frame ? ietf Use RFC1490/RFC2427 encapsulation R1 (config-if) #encap frame ietf While establishing a new network you may use a physical network and some hosts. Some of these hosts may require Cisco encapsulation while others work with IETF encapsulation, what would you do then? The simplest answer is that you can use each type of encapsulation on the basis of PVC (permanent virtual circuit). You can use one encapsulation on interface and other different encapsulations can be included in the appropriate map statement. In the example below you see that all PVCS are using the default Cisco encapsulation but PVC 115. The map statement for frame shows how PVC 115 has been specified using IETF. R1 (config) #int s0/0 R1 (config-if) #encap frame R1 (config-if) #frame map ip 172.12.123.3 123 broadcast R1 (config-if) #frame map ip 172.12.123.2 122 ietf broadcast The above show frame map clearly shows us that the mapping to DLCI 123 is by using default Cisco encapsulation, and DLCI 122 is using IETF. R1#show frame map Serial0 (up): ip 172.12.123.3 dlci 123(0x7B, 0x1CB0), static broadcast, CISCO, status defined, active Serial0 (up): ip 172.12.123.2 dlci 122(0x7B, 0x1CB0), static broadcast, ietf, status defined, active Keep in mind that Cisco encapsulation is default and all other PVCs can use Cisco only if you specify them as IETF is the frame mapping statement. There is also the option to make the complete network to use IETF encapsulation by suing an IETF command. If you want to make successful completion of your Cisco brain dumps or you are going to setup a large-scale corporate network then it’s important for you to learn many other things which are out of the box.