Computer Engineering

What does certified mean? There are four accepted meanings of the adjective “certified” but only two of which satisfy the needed meaning. To be certified means to be endorsed with authority by an institution or a person with a higher position after one successfully meets certain requirements. Another meaning is that a person is qualified to do a certain job as supported by an appropriate document better known and regarded as a Certification. * What certifications are there? If you are pertaining to online certifications, there are lots to be traced. To help you find one best certification that fits your ability and interest, you may log on to reliable sites in the internet. For now, the following are the basic IT certifications: • IT Auditing • Document Imaging • E-Commerce • Internet/Intranet • Linux • Networking • Printing • Project Management • IT Security • Servers • Service Technician • Technical Trainer • Webmaster * Who benefits from certification? P...

  I was reading The Big Moo: Stop Trying To Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable this morning, and I’d recommend a copy of this to anyone who wants to improve their career and their future. And that’s all of us, right?  There was one particular line that really stood out to me: Betting on change is always the safest bet available. That describes life perfectly, but it also describes a career in Information Technology perfectly as well. There is no field in the world that has the constant and never-ending changes that IT does. And every single one of us can look at this as a massive opportunity for personal and professional growth.  Is that how you’re looking at it? I remember when I passed my first certification exam, the Novell CAN, back in 1997. Man, I thought I knew it all then!   But I quickly learned that you’ve got to keep learning in IT. I also learned that if you’re willing to put in the work and make the sacrifices, there’s no other field with...

      Whether you're just starting your Information Technology career, or wanting to get further ahead in your current IT career, you have probably thought about earning one of the many popular computer certifications such as the Cisco Certified Network Associate ( CCNA ) certification, or the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) cert. A major point of frustration for individuals pursuing one of these certifications is a possible lack of experience with these technologies.  Many future CCNAs or MCSEs simply stop trying to earn their certification, feeling that their lack of experience will hold them back.   Adding to this are those in IT who will stop everything they're doing at the drop of a hat to stomp on the dreams of others.  I recently saw a post by an IT newcomer on a popular website where he declared his intention of earning his CCNA.  Within minutes, several naysayers popped up and told him that he shouldn't bother, i...

 Planning for success on the CCNA , CCNP , and other Cisco exams are much like taking a trip in your car. You've got to plan ahead, accept the occasional detour, and just keep on going until you get there. But what do you do before you get started? Create a road map - for success. If you were driving from one side of the country to another, you certainly wouldn't just get in your car and start driving, would you? No. You would plan the trip out ahead of time. What would happen if you just got in the car and started driving in the hope that you would someday arrive at your final destination? You would never get there, and you'd spend a lot of time wandering aimlessly. Don't spend your study time and slow your progress by studying for a Cisco exam without planning the trip. Schedule your study time as you would an appointment with a client, and keep that appointment. Make sure that your study time is quality study - turn your TV, iPod, and cell off. If you hit...

* What kinds of certifications should I consider for a PC Specialist career? As a PC Specialist, people will rely on your specialized computer training and skills to keep the office running smoothly. You must have the following certifications: • PC Specialist Certificate • Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer • Microsoft Certified Professional * What kinds of certifications should I consider for a Software Engineer career? The software engineer designs and develops systems to control and automate manufacturing, business, or management processes. To obtain a position as a Software Engineer, you must have: • A four-year degree in a computer-related discipline is required for most software engineering positions. • Certification in various software applications is suggested. • Training programs are available at community colleges, vocational schools, technical institutes and in the Armed Forces. Earning and maintaining computer certification is a good way for software ...

 Who benefits from certification? Primarily the one given a certification benefits more. Being certified means one can properly function on a certain job. This means companies will easily hire a person with certification especially when certifications come from a reliable learning institution. In some ways, the company to which a certified person intends to apply for work will also benefit since the performance of the applying employee is being supported with a certification. Is certification better than experience? The answer to that is a big "No." Certification means training. It is impossible for a person to send himself training without experiencing what it is he intends to do. For this reason, we cannot equate certification from experience since they do not share the same purpose. However, if you already have work experience, a certification is a big help for promotion, recognition and pay raise. On the other hand, companies are not solely after the...

If you are pertaining to online certifications, there are lots to be traced. To help you find one best certification that fits your ability and interest, you may log on to reliable sites on the internet. For now, the following are the basic IT certifications: • IT Auditing • Document Imaging • E-Commerce • Internet/Intranet • Linux • Networking • Printing • Project Management • IT Security • Servers • Service Technician • Technical Trainer • Webmaster

What Does Certified Mean?   There are four accepted meanings of the adjective “certified” but only two of which satisfy the needed meaning. To be certified means to be endorsed with authority by an institution or a person with a higher position after one successfully meets certain requirements. Another meaning is that a person is qualified to do a certain job as supported by an appropriate document better known and regarded as a Certification.

     CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam Tutorial: The BGP Neighbor Process Like TCP, BGP is connection-oriented.  An underlying connection between two BGP speakers is established before any routing information is exchanged. This connection takes place on TCP port 179.  As with EIGRP and OSPF, keepalive messages are sent out by the BGP speakers in order to keep this relationship alive.   Once the connection is established, the BGP speakers exchange routes and synchronize their tables.  After this initial exchange, a BGP speaker will only send further updates upon a change in the network topology. The IGP protocols that use Autonomous Systems, IGRP and EIGRP, require prospective neighbors to be in the same AS.  This is not true with BGP. Routers can be in different Autonomous Systems and still exchange routes.  The BGP neighbors do not have to be directly connected, and often are not, but do need to be able to reach the IP addr...

CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam Tutorial: EIGRP Stuck-In-Active Routes Passing the BSCI exam and earning your CCNP is all about knowing the details, and when it comes to EIGRP SIA routes, there are plenty of details to know. A quick check in a search engine for "troubleshoot SIA" will bring up quite a few matches. Troubleshooting SIA routes is very challenging in that there's no one reason they occur. View the EIGRP topology table with the show IP IGRP topology command, and you'll see a code next to every successor and feasible successor. A popular misconception is that we want these routes to have an "A" next to them - so they're active. That's what we want, right? Active routes sound good, right? Well, they sound good, but they're not. If a route shows as Active in the EIGRP topology table, that means that DUAL is currently calculating that route, and it's currently unusable. When a route is Passive ("P), that means it...

CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam Tutorial:  Server Load Balancing (SLB)   When you're working on your BCMSN exam on your way to CCNP certification, you'll read at length about how Cisco routers and multilayer switches can work to provide router redundancy - but there's another helpful service, Server Load Balancing, that does the same for servers. While HSRP, VRRP, and CLBP all represent multiple physical routers to hosts as a single virtual router, SLB represents multiple physical servers to hosts as a single virtual server. In the following example, three physical servers have been placed into the SRB group ServFarm.  They're represented to the hosts as the virtual server 210.1.1.14. The hosts will seek to communicate with the server at 210.1.1.14, not knowing that they're actually communicating with the routers in ServFarm. This allows quick cutover if one of the physical servers goes down, and also serves to hide the actual IP addresses of the ser...

CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam Tutorial:  QoS Service Types   To pass the CCNP exams, you’ve got to master Quality of Service, and the first step in doing so is knowing the differences between the different QoS types. Now this being Cisco, we can't just have one kind of QoS! We've got best-effort delivery, Integrated Services, and Differentiated Services. Let's take a quick look at all three.  Best-effort is just what it sounds like - routers and switches making their "best effort" to deliver data. This is considered QoS, but it's kind of a "default QoS". The best effort is strict " first-in, first-out" (FIFO).  An entire path from Point A to Point B will be defined in advance when Integrated Services are in effect. Integrated Services is much like the High-Occupancy Vehicle lanes found in many larger cities. If your car has three or more people in it, you're considered a "priority vehicle" and you can dri...

CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam Tutorial: HSRP MAC Addresses And Timers   To earn your CCNP certification and pass the BCMSN exam, you've got to know what HSRP does and the many configurable options.  While the operation of HSRP is quite simple (and covered in a previous tutorial), you also need to know how HSRP arrives at the MAC address for the virtual router - as well as how to configure a new MAC for this virtual router.  This puts us in the unusual position of creating a physical address for a router that doesn't exist! The output of the show standby for a two-router HSRP configuration is shown below. R2#show standby Ethernet0 - Group 5   Local state is Standby, priority 100   Hello time 3 sec , hold time 10 sec   Next hello sent in 0.776   The Virtual IP address is 172.12.23.10 configured   Active router is 172.12.23.3, priority 100 expires in 9.568   A standby router is local   ...

CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam Tutorial:  Getting Started With HSRP Defined in RFC 2281, HSRP is a Cisco-proprietary protocol in which routers are put into an HSRP router group. Along with dynamic routing protocols and STP, HSRP is considered a high-availability network service, since all three have an almost immediate cutover to a secondary path when the primary path is unavailable. One of the routers will be selected as the primary ("Active", in HSRP terminology), and that primary will handle the routing while the other routers are in standby, ready to handle the load if the primary router becomes unavailable. In this fashion, HSRP ensures a high network uptime, since it routes IP traffic without relying on a single router.  The hosts using HSRP as a gateway don't know the actual IP or MAC addresses of the routers in the group. They're communicating with a pseudo router, a "virtual router" created by the HSRP configuration. This virtual ...