IPv4

IP Networks need TLC too…

By Patrick Hunter — In the spirit of our proactive network maintenance issue this season, it just makes sense to talk about the importance of care and feeding for our inside networks as much as the outside plant.

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MPLS — What is it? In Plain English, Please…

By Patrick Hunter — For even the less experienced engineer or technician, there is a tool that can be employed for learning about a network, or even many networks, that is often undervalued. It’s actually very powerful in what it can teach us and requires very little in terms of high priced technology. I am of course referring to the “Traceroute” utility.

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A Closer Look at Routing

By Patrick Hunter — This is where the magic happens in routing protocols. When a network is so large that manually configuring static routes every time there is a change, the task is beyond daunting, it’s darn near impossible. Dynamic routing protocols take care of all the work for us thankfully.

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Traceroute Tool Provides Powerful Insight

By Patrick Hunter — For even the less experienced engineer or technician, there is a tool that can be employed for learning about a network, or even many networks, that is often undervalued. It’s actually very powerful in what it can teach us and requires very little in terms of high priced technology. I am of course referring to the “Traceroute” utility.

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Ethernet in a Nutshell

By Patrick Hunter — For a refresher, Ethernet was standardized as IEEE 802.3 in 1983. Remember, the standard covers both physical wiring and signaling standards at Layer 1 of the OSI model as well as functionality at Layer 2, the data link layer. Now let’s dive in.

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Networking 101 (Part Two)

By Patrick Hunter — From the perspective of the customer’s Internet service, the cable modem doesn’t have an IP address and does not route IP packets. But we do know that the cable modem has a NIC to which the customer’s computer is connected. So, if it has a NIC, then it has a MAC address as well! But remember, when we discussed the fact that the customer’s computer would have the MAC address of the default gateway as the destination MAC address

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IP Networking 101 (Part One)

By Patrick Hunter — That’s what I propose to offer you here over the next few installments: a cable perspective from the ground up on what all of that means and how they are interconnected, and most importantly, why any of it really even matters at all.

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Merging CATV IP Networks

By Patrick Hunter — There are quite a few challenges to consider in this arena, maybe the toughest being the challenge of integrating networks which have overlapped Internet protocol (IP) address space. In order to maximize the efficiencies and economies of scale that are available with the integration of networks

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