Tech Exam Prep

Tech Exam Prep

By Ran Chen, EA, CFP®EducationHow ToCourses
Download on the App Store

Tech Exam Prep episodes

  • CCNA Exam Prep 16, VLAN Trunking — 802.1Q and Native VLAN
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - How the 802.1Q standard inserts a 4-byte tag into Ethernet frames to carry traffic for multiple VLANs.
    - The specific function of the Native VLAN and why its frames are sent untagged across a trunk link.
    - The security vulnerabilities and network issues caused by a Native VLAN mismatch, a common CCNA exam scenario.
    - The essential Cisco IOS commands, such as `switchport mode trunk` and `switchport trunk native vlan`, for trunk configuration.
    - How Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP) modes, including 'dynamic desirable' and 'dynamic auto', negotiate a trunk link between switches.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    3 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 15, VLAN Fundamentals and Access Ports
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - That VLANs logically segment a switch into multiple Layer 2 broadcast domains to enhance security and performance.
    - An access port is a switch port assigned to carry traffic for only one specific VLAN.
    - By default, all ports on a Cisco switch belong to VLAN 1, which acts as both the default and native VLAN.
    - VLAN database information is stored in a separate file named 'vlan.dat' in flash memory, not in the startup-config.
    - The 'show vlan brief' command is the essential tool for verifying VLAN membership and port assignments on a switch.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 14, Forwarding Methods — Process, Fast, CEF
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - Process switching is the slowest forwarding method because the router's main CPU must handle every packet individually.
    - Fast switching improves performance by creating a route cache after the first packet of a flow is process-switched.
    - Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) is the default and fastest method on modern Cisco devices, using specialized hardware for lookups.
    - CEF relies on two pre-populated data structures: the Forwarding Information Base (FIB), derived from the routing table, and the Adjacency Table, derived from the ARP cache.
    - The CCNA exam tests your knowledge of the performance differences and the specific components of CEF, like the FIB and Adjacency Table.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 13, Switching Concepts — MAC Learning and Flooding
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - A switch learns MAC addresses by examining the source address of an incoming frame and adding it to its CAM table.
    - Forwarding and filtering decisions are always based on the destination MAC address in the frame header.
    - An 'unknown unicast' frame, where the destination is not in the CAM table, is flooded out all ports except the one it was received on.
    - Dynamically learned MAC address entries are removed from the table after a default aging timer of 300 seconds of inactivity.
    - Broadcast frames (destination FFFF.FFFF.FFFF) are always flooded, which is different from the conditional flooding of unknown unicast frames.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 12, Server Virtualization — VMs, Containers, VRF
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - The performance and use-case differences between Type 1 (bare-metal) and Type 2 (hosted) hypervisors.
    - How containers differ from VMs by virtualizing the OS and sharing a kernel, making them lightweight and fast.
    - The function of a virtual switch (vSwitch) in providing Layer 2 connectivity between VMs within a hypervisor.
    - How Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) creates multiple, isolated routing tables on a single router for Layer 3 segmentation.
    - To identify common CCNA exam scenarios that test your knowledge of choosing between VMs and containers, or VLANs and VRFs.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 11, Wireless Principles — RF, Channels, SSID
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - The key trade-offs between the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz Wi-Fi bands, including range, speed, and interference.
    - Why channels 1, 6, and 11 are the only non-overlapping channels in the 2.4 GHz band and its importance in network design.
    - The fundamental difference between an SSID (the network name) and a BSSID (the access point's unique MAC address).
    - How proper coverage cell design uses channel rotation to prevent interference and enable seamless roaming.
    - The function of band steering in dual-band networks to optimize overall wireless performance.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 10, Verification Tools — ping, traceroute, ARP
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - `ping` uses ICMP echo requests/replies to test reachability, with output symbols like `!` (success), `.` (timeout), and `U` (unreachable) being key troubleshooting clues.
    - Cisco's `traceroute` uses UDP packets with incrementing port numbers to map a path, unlike Windows which uses ICMP.
    - An asterisk (`*`) in traceroute output signifies a timeout, often due to a firewall or a router configured not to send ICMP Time Exceeded messages.
    - ARP resolves Layer 3 IP addresses to Layer 2 MAC addresses but only functions within the local broadcast domain; it cannot cross a router.
    - For IPv6, Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) replaces ARP, using Neighbor Solicitation (NS) and Neighbor Advertisement (NA) messages.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    5 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 9, IPv6 Configuration — SLAAC, DHCPv6, EUI-64
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - How SLAAC uses Router Advertisements (RAs) to allow a host to self-assign an IPv6 address using a provided network prefix.
    - The EUI-64 process creates a 64-bit interface ID by splitting a MAC address, inserting 'FFFE' in the middle, and flipping the 7th bit.
    - Stateful DHCPv6, triggered by the 'M' flag in RAs, provides full address assignment and tracking, similar to DHCP for IPv4.
    - Stateless DHCPv6, triggered by the 'O' flag, works with SLAAC to provide supplemental information like DNS servers without tracking addresses.
    - IPv6 Privacy Extensions (RFC 4941) generate random interface IDs as an alternative to EUI-64 to prevent a host from being tracked across networks.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    5 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 8, IPv6 Addressing Format and Types
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - IPv6 addresses are 128 bits, written as eight, 16-bit hexadecimal groups.
    - How to apply the two compression rules: omitting leading zeros and using the double colon (::) only once.
    - To identify unicast address types by their prefixes: Global (2000::/3), Unique Local (FC00::/7), and Link-Local (FE80::/10).
    - That IPv6 uses multicast (FF00::/8) and anycast, and has completely eliminated broadcast addresses.
    - Common CCNA traps like invalid address compression or choosing the wrong address type for a given network scenario.
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min
  • CCNA Exam Prep 7, VLSM and Subnet Planning
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams.
    In this episode you will learn:
    - VLSM (Variable-Length Subnet Masking) allows using different subnet masks in the same network to conserve IP addresses.
    - The most critical rule for VLSM planning on the CCNA exam is to always allocate IP blocks from the largest host requirement to the smallest.
    - Common exam traps include starting with the smallest subnet, miscalculating block boundaries, and creating overlapping address ranges.
    - To find the correct subnet size, calculate the required host bits (2^n - 2 >= hosts) and use that to determine the CIDR mask.
    - A helpful mnemonic for VLSM planning is: "Large to Small, or You'll Waste it All."
    For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
    4 min

About Tech Exam Prep

From the publisher's feed

Tech Exam Prep is a free, daily podcast by OpenExamPrep covering the most in-demand IT and technology certification exams — including CompTIA Security+, AWS Cloud Practitioner, CompTIA Network+, CCNA,…