CCNA - Basics (& CTF Updates)
I meant to post a while back, but life got in the way. I was on vacation at the beginning of July and then the week back from that was busier than I anticipated so I wasn’t able to get something up in time. I’m going to try to post again this week about a little distro hopping I did, and hopefully I can remain content enough with my decision to be done with that at least for a while. Also I’ve been working on Hack the Box and TryHackMe like a madman so I’ll post some stuff about that in the near future. Also, I’ve been looking at some REALLY basic and rudimentary game dev stuff for my part time job that I think is interesting.
In my CCNA studies, I’ve been mostly reviewing some pretty basic networking terms and ideas. Things such as TCP/IP model, same-layer adjacent-layer interaction, and physical cable mediums. In my opinion fiber optic cabling is really cool. Whenever I think about the idea of data traveling as light patterns I geek out a little bit. I mean that sounds like something out of Star Trek. Another crazy thing about fiber is that it’s limit of data transfer is not really known. Anyway, the two types of fiber cabling are multimode and single-mode fiber. Single-mode can go much further than multimode, but the cost of the transceivers is where single mode breaks away and gets much more expensive.
I also started getting into the weeds of ethernet data-link protocols. All the ethernet protocols use the same data-link standard. This standard defines the ethernet frame, more specifically the header and the trailer of the frame. The header contains the source and destination MAC (Media Access Control) address, among other things. The source says where the frame is from and the destination says where it’s going. Every ethernet device has a unique MAC address and ethernet can also use group addresses to send to multiple devices on a LAN at once. There was more that I learned including how you can tell what network protocol is being used based on an ethernet frame, and some talk of your typical copper network cabling, but at a certain point I’d just be copying my book/ video. These were just the things that stuck out to me. I’ll be posting whatever it is I happen to be studying, and what confuses or interests me as I move forward. It would not surprise me if I got any of this information wrong. If I did, please correct me in the comments below and I’ll be sure to edit my post.