Introduction to Networking and Networking Models

As we get started here with your CCN a 200 125 video boot camp I am Chris Bryant and I want to thank you for signing up for this course. We here at THE BRYANT advantaged know that you have a lot of training options out there and we appreciate you choosing us and for us to be part of your CCN exam success. We're going to kick off the course as you would expect with a section on an introduction to networking and the networking models. Now this will be a refresher for many of you but I am not assuming prior knowledge of these models so we are going to go over the two main networking models. Take a look at the layers that kind of thing like you would expect. But I also have some real world advice for you and here so if you are familiar with the networking models and such. Don't skip this section. Don't go ahead to section two because I really want in here something I have to say about how you can use these network models to make yourself a better network admin. I really like to fill my courses with some material or some things that I wish people had told me when I was studying for the CCMA and this section is heavy on that. So as we get started with that a really quick history lesson that does tie in with the rest of the section and it goes back to the days maybe 15 20 years ago when networking was actually pretty simple especially compared to today. And that's both good and bad because back then let's say you were networking a small office or a high school and I did both. You know people were absolutely thrilled when they could print to a printer in another room they could share some files. They were thrilled not to have to walk down the hallway or to another building and get a word document from somebody and especially with the schools that I worked in that had never been networked it was like you know what wizardry is this it is human beings will do after that initial thrill of printing to a printer in another room or off your end users are my end users that is wanted more and nothing wrong with that because it asks you know well what would it be great if we keep all of our documents on one computer somewhere and get them from there and share them and wouldn't it be great if only certain people had certain kinds of access to some of those files and hey you know our company is going to have this video presentation can we make it. Can we fix it so the employees can see that on their computers. And my favorite my sister in law watches videos of cats doing stuff on YouTube. Can I do that. That was an actual quote from a meeting on using the Internet for greater productivity. And as you might guess after that the meeting took kind of a downward trend. But in all seriousness though whether you've been in the field a long time whether you're totally brand new to it and you've been using computers in your personal life just think of all the services that we take for granted today that were fantasies 15 to 20 years ago you know voice and video forget it even if it existed you know even if you had a video file your network probably was unable to handle it. Who goes. Most networks 15 to 20 years ago could not begin to handle that kind of traffic in any kind of efficient manner today. You know if there's one hiccup in a YouTube cat video you know our phones are going off. People really expect a high level of voice and video quality. Now what about network security. You know same situation they are because having a security certification on your resume in that same time frame used to make a major stand out from the crowd. It was a luxury you know because network security was once seen by most clients as an extravagance you know a firewall. What would be a firewall for who's who's going try to get into my network. Well yeah but the network security devices that we have to work with today were barely a glimmer in their developers eyes again and that 15 to 20 years ago because hey the networks used to just be a few devices that needed to communicate you had some PCs you had a printer maybe had another printer and that might be it. But today's networks of course have all kinds of devices that need to play together nicely. You have a lot more PCs you have a lot more printers you've got those firewalls we're just talking about and all kinds of servers from certificat servers to e-commerce servers and everything in between. And the thing is every one of these servers is different. You know they're running different services and we've got to know how to make them available to our clients because that's where you and I the network admins come in. It's our job to get all of these devices to work together in an efficient manner. So our clients can do their job while we also work to keep the network secure. Now there's some security material here in the CCN a curriculum. And of course there is a separate CCN a security service occasion. I hope you'll look into it. And the reason I'm mentioning that is that while network security is important we can't just lock everything down. Cisco actually has a product or a feature in some of their software called One-Step lockdown. And you hit this button and you see these huge list of ports that are being closed and addresses that are banned and all kinds of things going on. But the thing once it's done your users probably can't do everything they need to do. So we just can't lock all the doors. We have to lock the doors and make sure the right people have the right keys. Now let me fill you in on why I'm telling you all of this. And where we're going here because I have been exactly where you are working on that scene a certification working on creating a brighter future for myself and my family. I am not one of these guys that walks around acting like they were born knowing everything in the world about networking. If you've been in the field for a while you probably know people like that and hated it. I am definitely not one of those people. The reason I bring this up is that I want to tell you again that I know from experience that studying the particular material in this section the networking models TZP and UDP and other networking fundamentals. It's in some ways it's the toughest material in the course to study but goes we're not on switches and routers doing a lot of stuff yet. It can be a little dry at times. Any theory can. And here's what I'm really getting that when you're a little tired or maybe a lot tired you're putting in those extra hours you're studying this material you're going to think something that entered my mind one night at the public library when I was studying for the CCMA. Do I really need to know those. Is this something I just need to memorize and kind of get pass the exam you know can I skip ahead to the next section. Well allow me to be your voice of experience here. You really do need to know this stuff. And the thing is that need goes well beyond earning your CCMA. Because knowing this material comes in handy in the real world and in the exam room and in this course I'm going to show you exactly how using the material in this section particularly the networking models can make you a network admin who is far superior to those admins who do not use the models and actually talk about a little bit right. Nail before we get to those models because there are two kinds of network admins in the world. There really are those who have a structured plan for troubleshooting and those who don't. Because for most of us in this field troubleshooting is most if not all of our job. It's not like we go to work every day and all the ralliers have been right array's stand there just waiting for us to reconfigure them every single That doesn't work that way. We end up troubleshooting whether it's on the phone in person or virtually and you want to be the admin with a troubleshooting plan and using a network model like the two we're going to look at here surely can make you that admin. And I'm going to revisit this topic in this section while we take a look at the two main networking models on your CCN a exam the oocyte model and the TCAP IP model. And we'll take a look at the OS II model in detail next.