In recent blogs I’ve talked about port roles which are designated and root ports. But today we are going to talk about port states which are blocking, listening, learning, and forwarding. Every port, no matter which role they are, is either blocking or forwarding. During a topology change, ports can be seen listening or learning….

Today we are going to talk about STP timers. STP consists of three timers that include a hello timer, max age timer, and a forward delay timer. These timer values are determined and set by the root bridge and the non-root bridges adapt to those timers.  Hello Timer – A hello timer is the interval at…

Today, we are going to talk about the root bridge and port roles in STP. STP is a protocol that provides a loop free topology so that networks can have redundant links without it causing a broadcast storm. In order for STP to provide redundancy while preventing layer 2 loops, switches and ports need to…

Hi, today I am going to talk about STP (Spanning Tree Protocol). STP is a layer 2 redundancy mechanism widely used to control layer 2 loops and broadcast storms logically. STP is an amazing protocol because not only does it prevent broadcast storms, but it provides redundancy so if something in the topology fails an…

There are certain types of traffic that require no VLAN tags at all when traversing a trunk link, and the switch will still know who the ethernet frame belongs to. An ethernet frame that travels trunk links without any VLAN tag belongs to the Native VLAN. By default the native VLAN is 1 but the…

Hi, today I am going to be talking about DTP (Dynamic Trunking Protocol) and VTP (VLAN Trunking Protocol). These are features that are not really used in modern networks because of security reasons but they are a part of the CCNA exam which I am currently studying for so why not. DTP is a protocol that…

During the past few articles I have talked about VLANs, VLAN tagging and all the good layer 2 things. But I didn’t discuss how hosts on different VLANs communicate, so let’s dive into it. The process of a host in one VLAN communicating with a host on another VLAN is interVLAN routing. This is the…

Hi, today I am going to dive into VLAN tagging and how it works. First let’s break down what access and trunk ports are. Access ports are ports that are connected to end devices such as PCs or laptops. When a switch port  is configured as an access port, it carries traffic for one VLAN…

Hi, today I am going to talk about VLANs (Virtual Local Area Network). In order to understand what VLANs are we need to know what a broadcast domain, and a LAN (Local Area Network) is. A broadcast domain is a set of devices that will receive a broadcast frame when any device in that set…

Hi, today I am going to dive into the classful addressing and classless addressing and their differences. Before classless IP addressing, there was rigid classful addressing. By classful, I mean that there is a block of fixed addresses per network, and the leading decimal had to be within a certain range as well. Let’s start…