Network Wizkid's Technical Knowledge Base

Congratulations! You are probably reading this because you have passed the first stage of the interview process for the aNCE program or you’re just curious person. Nevertheless I wanted to share what I encountered during stage 2 so that you have the best chance of success when you have your interview. If you pass this stage you will be invited to one of the Cisco offices to take part in an Assessment Day so you really need to make sure you perform well. This interview is approximately 45 minutes long so ensure you are in a quite area where you won’t be disturbed. My interview was conducted via Cisco Webex, no video was required but your requirements might be different so ensure you are smartly dressed for the occasion should they ask you to turn on your camera. So what is the interview blueprint for stage 2? In no particular order… Speak about yourself and of any certifications you have Speak about Cisco – why you would like to work for them and what you know about them Answer...

Recently I applied for the graduate Associate Networking Consulting Engineer (aNCE) position with Cisco and I wanted to share with you my journey. In a nutshell…The aNCE program is an intense 6 month program delivered in Poland, Krakow and focuses on developing aNCE’s into fully fledged Network Consulting Engineers (NCE’s). After successful completion of the program, aNCE’s are placed within their specified delivery team where they will hit the ground running by leading and solving technical challenges on a daily basis. After applying for one of the positions, if your CV is shortlisted you will be contacted by Cisco to arrange a short telephone call so that they can find out more about you as a person and why you would like to work for Cisco. This is not a technical interview ‘YET’ so no need to worry about that at this stage however be prepared to talk about: Your CV Your intentions for joining Cisco This interview will last approximately 30 minutes and may be conducted via Telephone ...

Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) is a Cisco propitiatory router protocol that provides first-hop redundancy for IP hosts on a LAN. It enables a set of router interfaces once configured to present a single virtual default gateway for IP hosts on the LAN. HSRP has two modes: ACTIVE – Physical router acts as the main router, by default the highest IP Address is elected the active router STANDBY – The second physical router that participates in HSRP and becomes the active router when the elected active router fails HSRP priorities can be used to determine the active router. The default priority is 100 HSRP versions: The default version used for Cisco IOS 15 is Version 1 Version 2 expands the number of supported groups from 0-255 in version 1 to 0-4095 Version 2 also supports IPv6 HSRPv1 uses Multicast address 224.0.0.2 HSRPv2 uses Multicat address 224.0.0.102 for IPv4 and FF02::66 for IPv6 HSRPv2 adds support for MD5 authentication HSRP virtual MAC addresses: Along with virtual IP addr...

In this article I would like to explore DHCP requests so that we can understand what happens when a device sends a request to a DHCP server. Lets start by listing some important information about DHCP….. DHCP is the abbreviation for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol DHCP uses UDP 67 & 68 – 67 – In a client-server environment port 67 is the BOOTP for the DHCP server and 68 is the BOOTP for the client The purpose of DHCP is to assign IP addresses automatically to the device that has requested an IP address How does the client interact with the DHCP server? In short… The client sends a DISCOVER frame asking for an IP address The DHCP server responds with an OFFER which contains an IP address and additional information The client sends a  REQUEST to use the IP address contained in the OFFER The DHCP server ACKNOWLEDGES the request to use the IP address The above process is what happens on the surface however there is a lot more going on if we take a look at the fram...