This article gives a high level overview of the routing protocols, and how they fit into our online lives.

Tthe TCP/IP protocol suite. All of those protocols are routed ones, but what are they in turn routed by? Read on to get a high level overview of the routing protocols, and how they fit into our online lives.

The routed vs. the routing

There has always been a great attraction for me to the networking protocols. I don’t know why I have always been fascinated by them, but they do interest me greatly. A good deal of my time has been spent studying and playing with the protocols contained in the TCP/IP protocol suite. What all those protocols have in common is that they are routed protocols. This begs the question of what routes them? A very good question indeed, and one that a great many books have been written about.

What I shall cover in this article is a breakdown of what routing protocols are. How they work, and what kinds of routing protocols there are. Things I won’t be covering are the Cisco IOS syntax used when configuring these routing protocols. Quite a few excellent books out there already do an admirable job of doing just that. Instead, as mentioned, I will concentrate on giving you a high level overview of what routing protocols are, the various types, and what it is that they do.

This is the first of a series of articles on TCP/IP troubleshooting, and future articles will focus on key issues highlighted in this article.

What do you think of when you hear the phrase "TCP/IP troubleshooting"? People who are visually imaginative may see a flowchart. More linear-minded types may see a series of numbered steps. Others (far too common) may feel a sense of inadequacy and frustration.

TCP/IP troubleshooting should be simple, right? After all, it's just a protocol—a series of steps to transfer bits over the network. But what a protocol—four layers, and multiple protocols at each layer.

So you lost the password on your Cisco switch. Maybe the old administrator left or maybe you just haven’t used this switch in a while and don’t recall the password. No matter what the case, you need to change the password on the switch so you can create a new password. How do you do this on a Cisco switch? It is a little more difficult than a Cisco router. One important difference between resetting the password on a Cisco switch vs. a router is that you don’t use configuration registers to reset the password on the switch. Let me show you how it’s done.