This is the third time ive sat down to try and write this and im not sure what the hold up is but perhaps this time, ill actually get through it. I meet with a personal trainer today and to be honest I have no idea what im doing in a gym and im hella out of shape. They gave me a really good deal so I guess I’m meeting with a trainer 2-3 times a week for the next year for group and individual meetings. Awesome. Anyway lets get back into Studying. I’m really excited about life right now haha, anyway.

So the answer is simple enough but I have no idea about this stuff and want to know why its working like this. Update, after doing some research this appears to be a red herring question because there is no diagram that I am finding that looks like this. This is usually a good indicator that while these questions may cover the topics at hand they will not necessarily be on the test. I have never taken a CompTia test before I can say thats how msft stuff works so when I’m doing going through this I wont wast time memorizing answers and will seek additional resources before testing. However, it would be nice to know what it looks like when you use a cable tester to get certain results and what those mean.

This is really just a question of listing shit out. I dont know what any of this is but im sure if I did the document choice would be obvious.

• AUP – Acceptable use policy
• SLA – Service level agreement
• SOW – Statement of work
• Security Policy – Security policy is a definition of what it means to be secure for a system, organization or other entity. For systems, the security policy addresses constraints on functions and flow among them, constraints on access by external systems and adversaries including programs and access to data by people.

Yeah thats obvious.

No idea what any of these things are other than an SLA so it’s possibly a good idea to learn what they are.

• MSA – Medicare savings account? ok, so when i google the test it comes up with master service agreement
• MOU – Memo of understanding
• SLA – Service level agrement
• AUP – Acceptable use policy

Again, that seems fairly reasonable.

• AAA configuration – ok, so im slightly confused by this but apparently this is a method for logging into routers deployed in a network to make changes
• Port Mirroring – mirrors traffic on two ports
• Virtual terminal configuration – fancy way of saying pop a shell, based on this “For example, applications can use a character-based presentation service called the Network Virtual Terminal (NVT), part of the Internet’s telnet remote access specification”
• Tagged VLAN configuration – VLAN tagging is a method through which more than one VLAN is handled on a port. VLAN tagging is used to tell which packet belongs to which VLAN on the other side. To make recognition easier, a packet is tagged with a VLAN tag in the Ethernet frame.
• Out-of-band management – In systems management, out-of-band management involves the use of management interfaces for managing servers and networking equipment. Out-of-band management allows the network operator to establish trust boundaries in accessing the management function to apply it to network resources

There are some debatable things going on here. Even for a person that doesn’t know much about networking but like the last one…involves a cable, and possibly a really long cable, that possibly goes over Ethernet at some point haha, ok right, thats different than remotely logging in with an id and password to open a shell.

Shockingly, I dont know a damn thing about this, there are ports and numbers and it all looks like a bunch of nonsense to me. So lets start with the words around the numbers.

• sport – source port
• srcip – source IP
• dstip – destination ip
• dport – destination port

That’s a helpful starting point. Honestly still kind of confused about the methodology. I think that beyond the basics there are some os specific syntax’s involved that will require a much larger base for me for me to understand. so “D and E”

Honestly, I have no idea why I added this. All the info is kind of debatable but i feel like forgetting the word ‘off site’ in the backup plain is problem.

Anyway, this took a while to write but there was a lot to unpack. I suppose that should be frustrating or something but welcome to the learning process for the people that refuse to be uneducated and are not overly concerned about the absurdity of existence. Its usually the gate keepers that are worried about you rather than the other way around. To be honest, if they are not intelligent I don’t really care what they have to say and odds are good that they will never read this or be concerned by something that’s actually interesting.

At this point im aware that a duplex mismatch is a speed error that doesnt seem to occur much in a modern environment however however the answers are something I’m still unsure of.

• Broadcast storms – A broadcast storm occurs when a network system is overwhelmed by continuous multicast or broadcast traffic.
• reduced performance – ok maybe i’m aware of this one
• packet collisions – When a packet collision occurs, the packets are either discarded or sent back to their originating stations and then retransmitted in a timed sequence to avoid further collision. Packet collisions can result in the loss of packet integrity or can impede the performance of a network.
• routing loops – A routing loop is a situation where a packet keeps getting routed between two or more routers because of problems in the routing table. In case of distance vector protocols, the fact that these protocols route by rumor and have a slow convergence time can cause routing loops.
• VLAN mismatch – Native VLAN mismatch and CDP. … The native vlan is used for untagged frames. So a frame without a tag on Switch A may be “viewed” as VLAN 1. If SwitchB has a native VLAN of 10, then all of a sudden traffic from one side of your network in VLAN 1 is being magically transferred into VLAN 10

uhaa, this doesnt make complete since but I sort of get the picture based on definitions. If traffic is set to be consumed slower at the destination than the source is sending it, I guess I could see how it could get stuck in a loop and have packet collisions. Obviously this is complete theory for me at this point as I have no idea how it really works.

This only sort of make sense and honestly it seems vendor dependant as why wouldn’t you use a console cable? There are several options. I’m not sure of what a loopback interface is though A loopback interface is a logical, virtual interface in a Cisco Router. A loopback interface is not a physical interface like Fast Ethernet interface or Gigabit Ethernet interface. … Loopback interfaces interfaces are always up and running and always available, even if other physical interfaces in the router are down. Thats helpful but im still not really sure what it does The loopback device is a special, virtual network interface that your computer uses to communicate with itself. It is used mainly for diagnostics and troubleshooting, and to connect to servers running on the local machine oh ok, its like that thing that assigns a link local address on your pc. I guess some how I didnt think of that definition.

I really dont know much about connectors or what these things are so lets make another list.

• RJ-45: These are like Ethernet connectors, 8 pin
• RJ-11: Phone cables
• ST: round fiber connector, connectors refer to having a “straight tip”, as the sides of the ceramic (which has a lower temperature coefficient of expansion than metal) tip are parallel—as opposed to the predecessor bi-conic connector which aligned as two nesting ice cream cones would. Other mnemonics include “Set and Twist”, “Stab and Twist”, and “Single Twist”,[citation needed] referring to how it is inserted (the cable is pushed into the receiver, and the outer barrel is twisted to lock it into place). Also they are known as “Square Top” due to the flat end face.
• SC: connectors, being square, have a mnemonic of “Square Connector”, which some people believe to be the correct name, rather than the more official “Subscriber Connector”.[6] Other terms often used for SC connectors are “Set and Click” or “Stab and Click”

Oh man, that’s easy once you know what it is. this test: list, list, lists. Hey remember when I put memes and commentary in posts because I had free time and found humor in stuff. Yeah me too. Here is a real obvious one, on the house.

Oh wait this is your first time reading this blog. Wow, don’t worry. your one of 4 people that has ever read this blog. (watch this) raise your hand if you’ve read this blog (one awkward guy in the back admits to it). I’m not sure this joke works but I think its funny to tell jokes to black holes…

I don’t know what a SOHO router is so I guess I should figure that out and then figure out what the stuff in the answers list is.

• SOHO router – A SOHO router is a broadband router built and marketed for small offices and home offices. … A SOHO network can be a mixed network of wired and wireless computers. and home offices.
• SPI – Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is an interface bus commonly used to send data between microcontrollers and small peripherals such as shift registers, sensors, and SD cards. It uses separate clock and data lines, along with a select line to choose the device you wish to talk to.
• Routing tables – ok maybe I know what this is but lets get a web def (lol) to be sure
• Switch port – literally a port on a switch, unless im reading this wrong. which is possible
• Port forwarding – (ok i know this one too, sort of) Port forwarding. In computer networking, port forwarding or port mapping is an application of network address translation (NAT) that redirects a communication request from one address and port number combination to another while the packets are traversing a network gateway, such as a router or firewall.

Why you would set up port forwarding is still a mystery, perhaps we should find out why you would do that. Update, this makes no sense and you should be able to login to a web interface for your cameras like every other security system. Have you ever seen shodan. Never mind. ok sure we have to set up port forwarding haha

This is slightly confusing and again, im not sure why wouldn’t use a console cable, which seems to be what A is describing. Regardless, lets get through some of this, absurd, but necessary injected jargon.

• Serial DB-9
• (this B answer, could they not have just said a regular ethernet cable?
• crossover cat5- this doesnt make a lot of sense, from what I know
• rj-11 on the rougher and an RJ-45, this is just weird.
• Rollover cable – Rollover cable (also known as a Yost cable, Cisco cable, or a Console cable) is a type of null-modem cable that is often used to connect a computer terminal to a router’s console port. This cable is typically flat (and has a light blue color) to help distinguish it from other types of network cabling. Ha! So a console cable…

I like these things where you learn stuff and the answer is obvious. I remember studying server for the first time and being like what in the ever loving shit is this and being able to find no information until I learned every aspect of server and then sort of was able to put together a vague concept of what the hell they where talking about. I should have gotten this done last night but at least I got it done this morning, so progress…yeah.

I’m suspicious of this question for a few reasons but lets, attempt, to get into some of these potential answers. However, I have a strong feeling that there is obvious clear answers pointing to prove that any of this is true and that this isn’t an arbitrary question. At least that’s my suspicion based on past history.

Ok so lets do this, this is too much writing for list so lets go with paragraph form.

Incorrect VLAN, I don’t necessarily understand VLANs but I kind of understand its a form of subnetting but the exact differences in practice kind of elude me. However with virtualization, I understand it. So from a website I found this Another consideration to keep in mind is that membership to a VLAN can be assigned both statically and dynamically. In static VLAN assignment, the switch ports are assigned to a specific VLAN, and new systems added will be assigned to the VLAN associated with that particular port. For example, plug a new system into port 8 and the user becomes part of the administrator’s network. Make sure you have the right port assigned to users. Which doesn’t really sound like it would cause a speed issue. Why would have you have a ‘slow’ VLAN?

Speed/duplex mismatch between the PC and the computer. They say this is the answer but I’m highly suspect. So from the web: A duplex mismatch occurs when two devices connected by Ethernet do not properly negotiate their connection. Ethernet has the option of running at different speeds (10, 100, or 1 Gbps) and has the option of running half duplex or full duplex. Choosing a mode of operation occurs when the cable is first connected or when an endpoint is first powered up. It is determined by a protocol negotiation between the two endpoints, which in theory should find the highest speed, and should choose full duplex if it is available and half duplex if full duplex is not available. In some cases that negotiation fails, and one end decides to run full duplex while the other end decides to run half duplex. Because the two endpoints are not running a common protocol, packet loss occurs. Honestly this seems highly unlikely on a windows PC in 2019 but ok. That’s what they are saying the issue is. So how the hell do we fix this? Again, this seems a bit far fetched as most of the answer pages are from 2009 and back Adjust duplex. That’s a fairly deep solution and it only drops it to half. I feel that this is more of a slightly obscure legacy issue than a modern problem that I would see in the field. This is kind of my gripe with actually doing the work and spending the money on CompTia exams but here I am, making the commitment to actually passing these things.

This one, I suppose, would cause latency issues. I read a little bit about this, mostly on Cisco sites, and it looks like this could cause issues with latency.

Bandwidth of the uplink ports on the switch are saturated. I’m not really sure what uplink ports are so I guess that’s a good place to start An uplink port is a special port (i.e., connector) on a network switch or hub that reverses the transmit and receive circuits of any twisted pair cable connected to it. It is also referred to as an MDI (medium dependent interface) port. Uplink ports eliminate the need for crossover cables Other than that, I don’t quickly see any info about what happens if they get saturated. It would be hard for me to imagine this being a huge issue between two switching aggregating traffic without there being another issue causing the saturation.

Given the answers, none of them really make sense, however the legacy tech problem

This is for sure a list question, I have no idea what these answers are to be honest. Since I’m being honest, I’m also aware that I’m here to learn.

• MT-RJ – MT-RJ stands for Mechanical Transfer Registered Jack. MT-RJ is a fiber-optic Cable Connector that is very popular for small form factor
• Patch panel – While a patch panel and switch may look the same on the front with their rows of ports that is where their similarities end, as each component serves a different purpose in a telecommunications room. … A switch is required in a local area network (LAN) whether a patch panel is used or not (i still dont really know the difference)
• 110 block – this is twisted pair wiring that again, seems legacy but I could be wrong on that. I mean, if i see a switch room with cat5 ill be lucky
• F-connector – this is for coax but apparently can be used for fiber per this question but this isn’t obvious on a google search

These wifi broadcast types (not sure if im using the right term) and and auth methods get confusing. Reasonably so as servicing wifi could be an entire occupation in its self very easily. So lets make some lists about auth types and network types.

• 802.11g – The 802.11g standard uses the same OFDM technology introduced with 802.11a. Like 802.11a, it supports a maximum theoretical rate of 54 Mbps. But like 802.11b, it operates in the crowded 2.4 GHz (and thus is subject to the same interference issues as 802.11b). 802.11g is backward compatible with 802.11b devices: an 802.11b device can connect to an 802.11g access point (but at 802.11b speeds).
• 802.11n – With the 802.11n standard, Wi-Fi became even faster and more reliable. It supports a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 300 Mbps (and can reach up to 450 Mbps when using three antennae). 802.11n uses MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) where multiple transmitters/receivers operate simultaneously at one or both ends of the link. This provides a significant increase in data without needing a higher bandwidth or transmit power. 802.11n operates in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.
• 802.11ac – 802.11ac supercharges Wi-Fi, with speeds ranging from 433 Mbps all the way up to several Gigabits per second. To achieve this kind of performance, 802.11ac works exclusively in the 5 GHz band, supports up to eight spatial streams (compared with 802.11n’s four streams), doubles the channel width up to 80 MHz, and uses a technology called beamforming. With beamforming, the antennae basically transmit the radio signals so they’re directed at a specific device.
• WPA – A WPA key is a password that you use to connect to a wireless network.
• WPA2 – Pre-Shared Key, and also called WPA or WPA2 Personal, it is a method of securing your network using WPA2 with the use of the optional Pre-Shared Key (PSK) authentication, which was designed for home users without an enterprise authentication server.
• WPA2 mixed mode – In a “WPA2” only network, all clients must support WPA2(AES) to be able to authenticate. In a “WPA2/WPA mixed mode” network, one can connect with both WPA(TKIP) and WPA2(AES) clients. Note that TKIP is not as secure as AES, and therefore WPA2/AES should be used exclusively, if possible.
• WPA with TKIP (WPA-TKIP) – This is the default choice for old routers that did not yet support WPA2.
• WPA with AES (WPA-AES) – AES was first introduced before the WPA2 standard was completed, although very few clients ever supported this mode.
• WPA2 with AES (WPA2-AES) – This is the default choice for newer routers and the recommended option for networks where all clients support AES.
• WPA2 with AES and TKIP (WPA2-AES/TKIP) – Routers need to enable both modes if any of their clients do not support AES. All WPA2 capable clients support AES but most WPA clients do not.

Lots of information pirated from websites. Clearly the legacy note is the winning factor in the answer. The router speed seems a bit arbitrary though.

So this says the environmental factors are wrong so we really only need to know two things.

• SFP – Definition of: SFP. SFP. (Small Form-factor Pluggable) A small transceiver that plugs into the SFP port of a network switch and connects to Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) optical fiber cables at the other end. Superseding the GBIC transceiver, SFP modules are also called “mini-GBIC” due to their smaller size.
• OM1 – OM1 cable typically comes with an orange jacket and has a core size of 62.5 micrometers (µm). It can support 10 Gigabit Ethernet at lengths up 33 meters. It is most commonly used for 100 Megabit Ethernet applications.

So OM1 is fairly slow fiber and as to why this is clearly an SFP issue is beyond me but given the options I can understand what they mean.

This is a tough one to really nail down the answers however I’m unclear on crossover cables so lets start there. Now, the need for crossover cables has been eliminated with more modern equipment. Gigabit Ethernet was created with a widely used option called Auto-MDIX (automatic medium-dependent interface crossover). This technology detects whether you need a crossover cable or a straight-through cable, and it automatically configures the network interface card accordingly.

Mmkay, still it means that the wires are not configured the same as a normal cat 5 cable which would cause a connection issue.

Lots of variables that I’m unclear on in this one.

• Single mode fiber (i think ive covered this before) – In fiber-optic communication, a single-mode optical fiber (SMF) is an optical fiber designed to carry light only directly down the fiber – the transverse mode. Modes are the possible solutions of the Helmholtz equation for waves, which is obtained by combining Maxwell’s equations and the boundary conditions.
• multimode fiber – Multi-mode optical fiber is a type of optical fiber mostly used for communication over short distances, such as within a building or on a campus. Typical multi-mode links have data rates of 10 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s over link lengths of up to 600 meters. I think this means it can handle several singnels instead one stream
• longwave sfp – I honestly cant find a definition for these two and C is the answer. I think its a type of module that transmits over fiber but I could be totally off base. I did find one for sale on amazon though, so i suppose thats helpful lol
• shortwave sfp – yeah no clue.

So thats all for today. I would like to think I will do another post tonight but that may not be true. Who knows, regardless I’m having a good time working hard.

There is a bunch of stuff I don’t know. I think im going to use the same strat of buying another test prep after I go through this one. It seemed to work well with the MCSA. I don’t think this is as hard but to be honest there is somewhat more of a learning curve for me with this stuff as I don’t know anything about networking. I’ve always thought that I am not smart enough to get any kind of Cisco cert but now that I’ve made it this far, I think I would like to at least try for a CCNA some time. Maybe start on it Q4 next year. Any way, here is that thing I do where I go through test questions that and write out answers. This is the most popular blog in the Known universe lol

What is any of this???

• MU-MIMO- MU-MIMO stands for multi-user multiple input and multiple output. It builds on single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO), which was introduced close to a decade ago with the 802.11n standard.
• LWAPP- Lightweight Access Point Protocol or LWAPP is the name of a protocol that can control multiple Wi-Fi wireless access points at once. This can reduce the amount of time spent on configuring, monitoring or troubleshooting a large network.
• PoE- power over eithernet
• MIMO- multiple transmitters and receivers to transfer more data at the same time. All wireless products with 802.11n support MIMO. The technology helps allow 802.11n to reach higher speeds than products without 802.11n.

Yeah, ok that one, also, makes sense once I know what the answers are.

again, no idea what any of this stuff is. How am I going to remember all of these acronyms.

• PPPoE – PPPoE stands for Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet, a network protocol for encapsulating Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) frames inside Ethernet frames. It is used mainly with DSL services where individual users connect to a DSL modem over Ethernet.
• MPLS – Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a routing technique in telecommunications networks that directs data from one node to the next based on short path labels rather than long network addresses, thus avoiding complex lookups in a routing table and speeding traffic flows.
• ATM – Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is a switching technique used by telecommunication networks that uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing to encode data into small, fixed-sized cells. This is different from Ethernet or internet, which use variable packet sizes for data or frames.
• SIP – Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, modifying and terminating real-time sessions that involve video, voice, messaging and other communications applications and services between two or more endpoints on IP networks.

While not specifically stated in the answer the diagrams for PPPoE do clearly state that a user name and password is required.

I have no idea what SC or ST cable is, so lets start there. Lol so apparently when you google either of these things it comes with information that they are both fiber cables, who knows the difference and the reset of the information is specific to a Net+ question so, I guess this is a memorize question. I did find some information about an adapter that converted the plugs, so that would appear to be the issue.

What the hell is a label-switching router? “An MPLS router that performs routing based only on the label is called a label switch router (LSR) or transit router. This is a type of router located in the middle of an MPLS network. It is responsible for switching the labels used to route packets.”

I have no idea what that means haha. Oh ok, so there’s this thing where you use labels instead of IP addresses? Isn’t that just a host name? Who knows. What ever but regardless this thing uses that type of tech. So what is MPLS, again, “MPLS is scalable and protocol-independent. In an MPLS network, data packets are assigned labels. Packet-forwarding decisions are made solely on the contents of this label, without the need to examine the packet itself. This allows one to create end-to-end circuits across any type of transport medium, using any protocol. The primary benefit is to eliminate dependence on a particular OSI model data link layer (layer 2) technology, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Frame Relay, Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET) or Ethernet, and eliminate the need for multiple layer-2 networks to satisfy different types of traffic. Multiprotocol label switching belongs to the family of packet-switched networks.”

Ok, so im aware of that and the answer is obvious but what is the rest of this stuff?

• BGP – Border gateway protocol (https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/BGP-Border-Gateway-Protocol)
• OSPF – Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a routing protocol for Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It uses a link state routing (LSR) algorithm and falls into the group of interior gateway protocols (IGPs), operating within a single autonomous system (AS). (it uses a formual to calulate the shortest distance between the two points) more detail…..Routing protocols like OSPF calculate the shortest route to a destination through the network based on an algorithm. The first routing protocol that was widely implemented, the Routing Information Protocol (RIP), calculated the shortest route based on hops, that is the number of routers that an IP packet had to traverse to reach the destination host. RIP successfully implemented dynamic routing, where routing tables change if the network topology changes. But RIP did not adapt its routing according to changing network conditions, such as data-transfer rate. Demand grew for a dynamic routing protocol that could calculate the fastest route to a destination. OSPF was developed so that the shortest path through a network was calculated based on the cost of the route, taking into account bandwidth, delay and load.[4] Therefore OSPF undertakes route cost calculation on the basis of link-cost parameters, which can be weighted by the administrator. OSPF was quickly adopted because it became known for reliably calculating routes through large and complex local area networks.[5]
• IS-IS- This doesn’t make a lot of sense and it seems like legacy tech so im not going to spend a bunch of time on it.

What is a CSU/DSU device? A CSU/DSU (channel service unit/data service unit) is a digital-interface device used to connect data terminal equipment (DTE), such as a router, to a digital circuit, such as a Digital Signal 1 (DS1) T1 line. The CSU/DSU implements two different functions.

Alright, its like NIC for T1 lines. Do people still use those?

Channel bonding? Again, no fucking clue haha. Channel bonding is a practice commonly used in IEEE 802.11 implementations in which two adjacent channels within a given frequency band are combined to increase throughput between two or more wireless devices. This seems to be a fairly loose definition as I’m also seeing mention of combining two network conenctions for faster nic speeds.

I’m exactly clear on what any of these answers mean other than WAN.

• CAN – A Controller Area Network (CAN bus) is a robust vehicle bus standard designed to allow microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other in applications without a host computer.
• PAN – A personal area network (PAN) is a computer network for interconnecting devices centered on an individual person’s workspace. A PAN provides data transmission among devices such as computers, smartphones, tablets and personal digital assistants.
• MAN – A metropolitan area network (MAN) is a network that interconnects users with computer resources in a geographic area or region larger than that covered by even a large local area network (LAN) but smaller than the area covered by a wide area network (WAN).

I don’t think this is correct but ok. D seems like the appropriate answer.

This is more complicated than im used to. Normally a gateway router and forward is ISP and a company router and back is us. I suppose it would be helpful to know what some of this stuff is.

• Demarc – lol, this is literally the answer. like the definition is the answer. A demarc (an abbreviation for demarcation point) marks the point where communications facilities owned by one organization interface with that of another organization. In telephone terminology, this is the interface between customer-premises equipment and network service provider equipment.
• IDF – An intermediate distribution frame (IDF) is a distribution frame in a central office or customer premises, which cross-connects the user cable media to individual user line circuits and may serve as a distribution point for multipair cables from the main distribution frame (MDF) or combined distribution frame (CDF) to individual cables connected to equipment in areas remote from these frames.
• CSU/DSU – T1 modem
• 110 block – A 110 block is a type of punch block used to terminate runs of on-premises wiring in a structured cabling system. The designation 110 is also used to describe a type of insulation displacement contact (IDC) connector used to terminate twisted pair cables, which uses a punch-down tool similar to the older 66 block

Ok so, demarc it is.

That’s all for now. I finished this up at work so I guess work posting is a thing. I wanted to get it taken care of last night but had to run a bunch of errands and went to the gym. I was exhausted by the time I got home.

Ok, part 3, after im done with this ill be 1/3rd through the test. Exciting. Not much eles for an intro.

Most of todays review is not super complicated. Its just memorizing stuff. Like this.

• Simple Network Management Protocol is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. Wikipedia
• Port(s): 161, 162 (Trap)

Honestly didnt even know what SNMP was.

To be honest with you, I dont really know what any of this is. Lets find out though.

• Multiplexing – Multiplexing is a popular networking technique that integrates multiple analog and digital signals into a signal transmitted over a shared medium. Multiplexers and de-multiplexers are used to convert multiple signals into one signal. This term is also known as muxing.
• de-multiplexing – A demultiplexer (or demux) is a device that takes a single input line and routes it to one of several digital output lines. A demultiplexer of 2n outputs has n select lines, which are used to select which output line to send the input
• encapsolation – In computer networking, encapsulation is a method of designing modular communication protocols in which logically separate functions in the network are abstracted from their underlying structures by inclusion or information hiding within higher level objects.
• modulation-In electronics and telecommunications, modulation is the process of varying one or more properties of a periodic waveform, called the carrier signal, with a modulating signal that typically contains information to be transmitted

Ah yes, of course. The ye old ‘how far down the rabbit hole would like to go.’ For now, far enough to get this cert and now that I know the answers, its clearly A.

Yeah, i dont know. I’m going to make a list of things I dont know about.

• FCoE – Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. This allows Fibre Channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks (or higher speeds) while preserving the Fibre Channel protocol.
• Frame Relay – Frame relay is a packet-switching telecommunication service designed for cost-efficient data transmission for intermittent traffic between local area networks (LANs) and between endpoints in wide area networks (WANs).
• TCP Offloading -TCP offload engine is a function used in network interface cards (NIC) to offload processing of the entire TCP/IP stack to the network controller. By moving some or all of the processing to dedicated hardware, a TCP offload engine frees the system’s main CPU for other tasks.
• Jumbo Frame – A jumbo frame is an Ethernet frame with a payload greater than the standard maximum transmission unit (MTU) of 1,500 bytes. Jumbo frames are used on local area networks that support at least 1 Gbps and can be as large as 9,000 bytes. Because jumbo frames are not defined in the IEEE 802.3 specifications for Ethernet, vendor support for jumbo frames and their maximum transmission units may vary.
• Quality of Services – Quality of service (QoS) refers to any technology that manages data traffic to reduce packet loss, latency and jitter on the network. QoS controls and manages network resources by setting priorities for specific types of data on the network.
• Equal cost multipath – a network routing strategy that allows for traffic of the same session, or flow—that is, traffic with the same source and destination—to be transmitted across multiple paths of equal cost. … When forwarding a packet, the routing technology must decide which next-hop path to use.

You know, im starting to see this theme where when you understand what the answers are, the correct one is apparent. Its just this test though. Dont worry.

Interesting, I set this one out to learn as well and it turns out. Its the same answer and it was apparent right away once I put effort into understanding what was going on.

I’m not putting a ton of effort into this as there isnt a ton of effort put into describing the material the cable was made of which would give the indicator for a need for a singal repeater. Wait whats that, it does? Lets look that up because that would be the answer. The maximum length is 100 meters, without using any kind of signal regeneration device, and a maximum data transfer rate of 1000 Mbps for Gigabit Ethernet. Shielded Twisted Pair (STP), like UTP, also has four pairs of wires with each wire in each pair twisted together.. Well, there we go, cable is about 50% too long.

No idea what this is, lets find out!

Carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) is a media access control method used most notably in early Ethernet technology for local area networking. It uses carrier-sensing to defer transmissions until no other stations are transmitting.

So this is some old lan stuff and hub is the only thing that makes any sense.

Its list time again, boys and girls.

• AS number – An autonomous system number (ASN) is a unique number that’s available globally to identify an autonomous system and which enables that system to exchange exterior routing information with other neighboring autonomous systems. The number of autonomous system numbers is limited.
• OSFP – Octal Small Formfactor Pluggable, is a very new module and interconnect system in development that is targeted to support 400-G optical data links inside datacenters, campuses and external metro long reach.
• Tree ports in flooding mode – a unicast flood is when a switch receives a unicast frame and treats it as a broadcast frame, flooding the frame to all other ports on the switch.
• BGP routing issues – Border Gateway Protocol is protocol that manages how packets are routed across the internet through the exchange of routing and reachability information between edge routers. BGP directs packets between autonomous systems (AS) — networks managed by a single enterprise or service provider

So this one isn’t exactly clear to me at this point but i can vaguely get the concept.

Ok so apparently I dont know any thing about networking, I was aware of this but its worse than I thought. Which, honestly, is great because I love learning new things so this may take longer than expected. Who knows though, maybe ill have it done by the end of the year.

Single media? This a cable type? I’m totally confused. I guess I should do that thing where I type out what each of the answers are.

Answers
• multimode- While multimode means the fiber can propagate multiple modes. The difference between single mode and multimode fiber mainly lies in fiber core diameter, wavelength, light source and bandwidth.
• Single mode- (a type of fiber optic cable) Single mode means the fiber enables one type of light mode to be propagated at a time.
• cat 5e- a 5 pair networking cable
• cat 6e- a 6 pair networking cable

Also this exists Single/multi mode fiber

This is really not that hard but you see, the thing is, I’m not very familiar with ports. Anyway, here is a chart.

ports
• 20- File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Data Transfer
• 21- File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Command Control
• 22- Secure Shell (SSH)
• 23- Telnet – Remote login service, unencrypted text messages
• 25- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) E-mail Routing
• 53- Domain Name System (DNS) service
• 80- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used in World Wide Web
• 110- Post Office Protocol (POP3) used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a server
• 119- Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
• 123- Network Time Protocol (NTP)
• 143- Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) Management of Digital Mail
• 161- Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
• 194- Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• 443- HTTP Secure (HTTPS) HTTP over TLS/SSL

So yeah, I guess i should know those. Maybe. I cant even name all the tracks on my favorite album, Transylvanian Hunger.

I hate the OSI model. Its the worst thing in the entire world. Like, never mind. I mean, its not that bad. I just don’t understand it that well and I have spent two hours reading trying to find some sort of proof of concept that encapsulation is removed as traffic is pulled through the layers and I can find no evidence of this. Honestly, I should probably buy a book on the OSI model and actually read it, however, I’m not exactly sure that I have time for that. Regardless, I might still purchase to peruse and pretend that I’m educated on the books contents by pointing at it while smoking a pipe and wearing a robe, clearly entrenched in another book as people enter my domicile. For the time being I’m not going to say much about about this other that I have accept this as fact but I have learned some things about the OSI model so for now im going to chaulk that up to a sucess.

In case I forgot, lets go over this again:

DNS records
• A (Host address)- It is used to translate human friendly domain names such as “www.example.com” into IP-addresses such as 23.211.43.53
• AAAA (IPv6 host address) An AAAA-record is used to specify the IPv6 address for a host (equivalent of the A-record type for IPv4).
• ALIAS (Auto resolved alias) ALIAS-records are virtual alias records resolved by Simple DNS Plus at at the time of each request – providing “flattened” (no CNAME-record chain) synthesized records with data from a hidden source name.
• CNAME (Canonical name for an alias) the computer “computer1.xyz.com” may be both a web-server and an ftp-server, so two CNAME-records are defined: “www.xyz.com” = “computer1.xyz.com” and “ftp.xyz.com” = “computer1.xyz.com”.
• MX (Mail eXchange) MX-records are used to specify the e-mail server(s) responsible for a domain name.
• NS (Name Server) NS-records identify the DNS servers responsible (authoritative) for a zone.
• PTR (Pointer) PTR-records are primarily used as “reverse records” – to map IP addresses to domain names (reverse of A-records and AAAA-records).
• SOA (Start Of Authority) The host name of the primary DNS server for the zone.
• SRV (location of service) SRV-records are used to specify the location of a service. They are used in connection with different directory servers such as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), and Windows Active Directory, and more recently with SIP servers (see https://simpledns.com/kb/112).
• TXT (Descriptive text) often used to hold general information about a domain name such as who is hosting it, contact person, phone numbers, etc.

This is confusing because there are a million things this could be and DNS would be the last thing I would check. A,C and E are also plausible candidates. If the test has questions like this that are not on pretest stuff that sucks haha. Also, im taking for granted that they are logging into an AD domain. Honestly, I did some research and this seems like the least likely answer and I’m going to just go with it. The only way that this could be possible would be a firewall issue between the DC hosting DHCP and the clients. DNS causing login failures to connect to a DHCP server and thus domain authentication seems kind of far fetched, but ok.

I’m not even sure what a broadcast domain is so lets start there.

Broadcast domain- A broadcast domain is a logical division of a computer network, in which all nodes can reach each other by broadcast at the data link layer. A broadcast domain can be within the same LAN segment or it can be bridged to other LAN segments.

So like a VLAN? Anyway, after looking at this I realized that this was easy af. broadcast domain

I guess that’s all for the night, off to the gym.

Well its Monday, time to start something new. I’m ready to get into Network+ and maybe go through to PenTest+ over the course of the next year. Regardless it would be great to get Network+ done by year end. Which seems doable but I could be wrong. Anyway, lets get into that thing that I use this blog for where I post a slide and then break it down until I figure out whats going on because memorizing answers does not do it for me.

The longer I look at this the more I’m not sure why I added it other than I didn’t really know what they meant by device density. Like are they using old laptops or something? I mean it would be a safe assumption I suppose. The other thing I hate about comptia stuff is that they use language that I’m assuming you cant pull from the web to study for. Like maybe this stuff is in a book. Did a quick search and it mentions the concept as a bullet point then gives no further info.

Ok so this does exist: What is network density

Ok jeeze, that does make sense. It doesn’t specifically say timeout errors connecting to resources but that makes sense. A rouge access point would also provide for this as its possible to have internet access and no access to internet resources, clearly.

I dont really know what any of this stuff is so I’m going to have to start by looking up each of these terms, just to be through.

Stuff in question
• Rssi- RSSI stands for Received Signal Strength Indicator. It is an estimated measure of power level that a RF client device is receiving from an access point or router. At larger distances, the signal gets weaker and the wireless data rates get slower, leading to a lower overall data throughput.
• channel vlan- Virtual local area networks (VLANs) are a wonderful wireless network security tool by enabling its separation technology. You can implement VLANs in several ways when working with your wireless LAN. VLANs allow you to. Separate different types of traffic based on the SSID to which they connect. however these appear to be channels rather than vlans, which is confusing
• Overlapping channels- Short Answer: Only use channel 1, 6, or 11. Longer Answer: In the United States, while channels 1-13 can be used for 2.4 GHz WiFi, only three channels are considered non-overlapping (channels 12 and 13 are allowed under low powered conditions, but for most cases are not used)
• signal strength- see RSSI
• ssid broadcast- The continuous transmission of packets from a Wi-Fi access point that announces its availability. Also called “beaconing,” if the network is secured with a password, users will see the SSID, but not be able to access it (see WEP and WPA).
• incorrect VLAN- Using the wrong wireless vlan, I understand what a vlan is but its confusing when incorporating wireless tech into it. Is this like a separate SSID or you some how are randomly assigned to a separate vlan when connecting to the SSID? I cant be perfectly sure on every thing so I’ll figure this out as we go.

So the overlapping channel thing kind of makes since you are only supposed to use 1, 6, or 11 but it still seems as if its miss labeled. Or maybe the vlan is the channel? Unclear but i’m sure ill understand it eventually so lets move on.

Answers
• DMZ- I feel like this is has been replaced by WAP or web application proxy in terms of naming conventions but its past the network firewall and less closed off to web traffic
• NAT- I’m assuming this is network address translation which could possibly have something to do with phones but I’m not sure
• VLAN- We just covered a VLAN but its a virtual network and I have no idea what it could have to do with phones but then again, I know absolutely nothing about VOIP tech to be honest
• QoS- QoS (Quality of Service) is a major issue in VOIP implementations. The issue is how to guarantee that packet traffic for a voice or other media connection will not be delayed or dropped due interference from other lower priority traffic. Ok google thats fairly broad but its clear that this is the issue in this case. ok.

answers
• Switch set to full duplex- WiFi is Half Duplex – A wired Ethernet network is full duplex, meaning a device can send and receive, or upload and download, simultaneously. WiFi is half duplex, so if a client is sending data to the AP, the AP can not also send data to the same or any other client at the same time.
• Conflicting IP addresses- An IP address conflict occurs when two communication endpoints on a network are assigned the same IP address. Endpoints can be PCs, mobile devices, or any individual network adapter. IP conflicts between two endpoints normally render either one or both of them unusable for network operations
• Packet bottlenecks- A bottleneck occurs when bandwidth is unable to accommodate large amounts of system data at designated data transfer rate speeds. Road traffic is a common bottleneck analogy. For example, bottle necking is inevitable when only one of two busy road lanes is passable.
• IP address scope depletion- This is the DHCP server running out of addresses in a given address space causing clients to be unable to request an IP assignment for the network

I like this test, once you understand the definitions, so far, the answers are obvious. Clearly a performance issue would be the cause of a performance issue. I mean, given that I’m actually studying the right material. I may purchase a pretest from another location to verify that I’m actually studying the right material before dropping the money on the test.

Again, I don’t really know any of this because I don’t know squat about networking. I’m starting to realize it may be more than simply doing math. This excites me.

Answers
• VLAN mismatch- VLAN mismatch basically is saying that you have a device plugged into your Cisco device that has a different native VLAN than your switch. Clear as mud to me at this point
• Duplex/Speed mismatch-On an Ethernet connection, a duplex mismatch is a condition where two connected devices operate in different duplex modes, that is, one operates in half duplex while the other one operates in full duplex. The effect of a duplex mismatch is a link that operates inefficiently. Duplex mismatch may be caused by manually setting two connected network interfaces at different duplex modes or by connecting a device that performs auto-negotiation to one that is manually set to a full duplex mode.
• Duplicate IP address- This will make both devices not functional, leasing issue
• TX/RX reverse- One particular type of cabling issue is the one in which the Transmit and the Receive pairs of a cable are inversed so the TX sides are connected to each other and the RX sides are connected to each other (as opposed to the correct way of connecting TX to RX).

So the answer still somewhat escapes me as I don’t understand the the exact issue described in the problem and there is an explanation on Cisco forums that provides all sorts of hot topics such as trunks and vlans and devices and I don’t know whats going on. I kind of get excited at that point to learn because I’m a nerd.

I guess that’s all for now but I really don’t know much of this so I’ll probably post a ton of stuff. I really hate that there isn’t one source for this stuff like TechNet but so far I can mostly make out the information on various websites/blogs

I passed!

I found some more things that I wanted to go over today while going through the test at work. Included on thing specifically mentioned. I was taking screen shots and going through the material in between calls so I’m not sure if I got the full variance of the questions that I was struggling with but I made it through like all but 75 of the questions while working so I feel like I have a good grip on the material and now im getting granular with my understandings of specifics on repeated questions with slight variable changes. Any way. That may have been too complicated of way to say that I’m trying to figure the last little bit of stuff out before…Saturday. It’s possible I’ll pass but to be honest I don’t have my hopes up. Or what if I pass and then I’m told for some reason that my 2012 MCSA cant be upgraded. That would also be the opposite of the bees knees. I don’t what that means so lets get into some things haha

These three where really throwing me off as they use the exact same bad screen shot. Without going into much detail the one that uses PowerShell connecting to external is incorrect and the ones that uses RRA snap-in works or the PS internal also works. Not really much else to talk about but it was driving me nuts because I was basically guilty of trying to memorize the answer without really looking into the question. How embarrassing.

These two also annoy me. Same scenario and there may be 1 more that I didn’t get to when going through questions today. Guest services works and nothing else does. Its really annoying when going through the material because your like ‘I just saw this question and it was no!’ or vise versa. I feel like there might be one more of these but I could be wrong on that. Who knows.

This SR-IOV stuff is a mess. There are like 3 unique questions on this and only one of them is correct. It also uses the GUI.

Seriously, how many times can you ask the same question? It’s a safe bet that the answer is no but still, you know, I would like to get as many questions correct as possible. So it looks like the only way to do this is through device manager. I literally just went through all 300 questions to find the one that was the correct SR-IOV lol. I wanted to know which one was right and to be honest this is the only way it would work. I tried to find a TechNet article on this but I think this is another question where you have to lab the answers. Any way, its late and there isn’t much text in this but really I was more interested in creating a repository for these images to look at these similar questions. There are more questions that had planned to include in this but staying up yesterday from 4 am to almost midnight and well…I basically haven’t really stopped doing something in a few days so I may need to take a breather lol. However, honestly, I’m feeling pretty good with this material. If (thats a big if) I’m studying the right thing I think I’ll pass. Regardless, its time to find out.

I’m set to take the test this weekend and there are a few things I would like to cover today before taking the test Saturday at 3 pm. Honestly, I kind of doubt I’ll pass but its time to try as my scores on the pretests are in the 900 range and a 700 hundred is passing. The things that are left that are confusing are mostly repetitive questions where they change one detail and the entire thing is different. These types of questions are usually tough to find answers to on TechNet but can be recreated in a lab. However, I’m not going to set up a lab. Maybe one day but at present I don’t really have the time or desire to create a Windows Server lab. Anyway, I’ve got 10 slides that I want to go through and hopefully I will get through them all tonight.

Based on this I’m going to assume that this a result of the disk being set as NTFS instead of GPT. I could be wrong about that but it does appear to be the reason that the answer is to use disk part. It’s honestly kind of baffling that there are so many choices for types of disks and so forth that, to be honest, don’t seem to do much other than cause issues. Reason number 428 of why Hyper-V is annoying lol. I mean, to be honest I haven’t seen it in enterprise production use so I could be jumping to conclusions here.

So one would assume that you would use disk-part to adjust something related to a disk but apparently that is incorrect. A quick search through TechNet yields this nugget that you would think would be the extra version but its not:

Set-VHD

[-Path]

-PhysicalSectorSizeBytes

[-Passthru]

[-CimSession ]

[-ComputerName ]

[-Credential ]

[-WhatIf]

[-Confirm]

[]

So now we know how to set physical sector bytes.

This is network security group thing is new and to be quite frank, I have no idea what it is. The only info I can find about it mentions Azure and none of the questions with this as an answer seem to directly mention Azure. Literally this is only used with Azure so its seems crazy that the questions wouldn’t reference Azure. Honestly, this explains it the best out of what I found so far: Network Security group

This one throws me off and it took a while to figure out that there are several questions related to this and that the answer is the one that references SCVMM is correct and any thing else is wrong. I thought I took better screen shots today but it would appear that I did not.

Honestly I know what a Radius server is but the exact process, escapes me

Honestly, this is the best info. I cant really find the exacts for PS on this one. This is one of those things that makes me nervous for sys admins but I’m going to assume you figure things out after a while. Case in point, I’ve picked up most of this new material quickly. Granted, I have no idea if this is whats on the test and that has me nervous.

These questions confuse the shit out of me and I have no idea why any of them are the way they are but like they make sense in a lab I’m assuming. This one, actually has an answer. Which to be honest I don’t even look at the answers usually. This one says we have to make iSCSI which makes sense.

The answer to this one is the fail over cluster manager and it seems like the questions that mention failover cluster that’s actually the answer.

To be honest, again, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here so Web Application Proxy does require ADFS for auth. Its not totally cut and dry but its a safe assumption.

There are a few other questions that I’m unclear on as I pass quickly through the test as it seems like I’m looking at the same question and the answer is different but I know I’m missing a detail. I may go back through those
at a later date but for the rest of the week my focus is on just going through the questions and answering them over and over.