Things really can’t get much simpler than this. And yes, though you can still find this configuration in some home networks, even many of those as well as the smallest business networks are more complicated today. As we move through this book, I’ll just keep building upon this tiny network a bit at a time until we arrive at some really nice, robust, and current network designs – the types that will help you get your certification and a job!

      But as I said, we’ll get there one step at a time, so let’s get back to the network shown in Figure 1.1 with this scenario: Bob wants to send Sally a file, and to complete that goal in this kind of network, he’ll simply broadcast that he’s looking for her, which is basically just shouting out over the network. Think of it like this: Bob walks out of his house and yells down a street called Chaos Court in order to contact Sally. This might work if Bob and Sally were the only ones living there, but not so much if it’s crammed with homes and all the others living there are always hollering up and down the street to their neighbors just like Bob. Nope, Chaos Court would absolutely live up to its name, with all those residents going off whenever they felt like it – and believe it or not, our networks actually still work this way to a degree! So, given a choice, would you stay in Chaos Court, or would you pull up stakes and move on over to a nice new modern community called Broadway Lanes, which offers plenty of amenities and room for your home plus future additions all on nice, wide streets that can easily handle all present and future traffic? If you chose the latter, good choice… so did Sally, and she now lives a much quieter life, getting letters (packets) from Bob instead of a headache!

      The scenario I just described brings me to the basic point of what this book and the Cisco certification objectives are really all about. My goal of showing you how to create efficient networks and segment them correctly in order to minimize all the chaotic yelling and screaming going on in them is a universal theme throughout my CCENT and CCNA series books. It’s just inevitable that you’ll have to break up a large network into a bunch of smaller ones at some point to match a network’s equally inevitable growth, and as that expansion occurs, user response time simultaneously dwindles to a frustrating crawl. But if you master the vital technology and skills I have in store for you in this series, you’ll be well equipped to rescue your network and its users by creating an efficient new network neighborhood to give them key amenities like the bandwidth they need to meet their evolving demands.

      And this is no joke; most of us think of growth as good – and it can be – but as many of us experience daily when commuting to work, school, etc., it can also mean your LAN’s traffic congestion can reach critical mass and grind to a complete halt! Again, the solution to this problem begins with breaking up a massive network into a number of smaller ones – something called network segmentation. This concept is a lot like planning a new community or modernizing an existing one. More streets are added, complete with new intersections and traffic signals, plus post offices are built with official maps documenting all those street names and directions on how to get to each. You’ll need to effect new laws to keep order to it all and provide a police station to protect this nice new neighborhood as well. In a networking neighborhood environment, all of this is carried out using devices like routers, switches, and bridges.

So let’s take a look at our new neighborhood now, because the word has gotten out; many more hosts have moved into it, so it’s time to upgrade that new high-capacity infrastructure that we promised to handle the increase in population. Figure 1.2 shows a network that’s been segmented with a switch, making each network segment that connects to the switch its own separate collision domain. Doing this results in a lot less yelling!

FIGURE 1.2 A switch can break up collision domains.

      This is a great start, but I really want you to make note of the fact that this network is still one, single broadcast domain, meaning that we’ve really only decreased our screaming and yelling, not eliminated it. For example, if there’s some sort of vital announcement that everyone in our neighborhood needs to hear about, it will definitely still get loud! You can see that the hub used in Figure 1.2 just extended the one collision domain from the switch port. The result is that John received the data from Bob but, happily, Sally did not. This is good because Bob intended to talk with John directly, and if he had needed to send a broadcast instead, everyone, including Sally, would have received it, possibly causing unnecessary congestion.

      Here’s a list of some of the things that commonly cause LAN traffic congestion:

      ■ Too many hosts in a collision or broadcast domain

      ■ Broadcast storms

      ■ Too much multicast traffic

      ■ Low bandwidth

      ■ Adding hubs for connectivity to the network

      ■ A bunch of ARP broadcasts

      Take another look at Figure 1.2 and make sure you see that I extended the main hub from Figure 1.1 to a switch in Figure 1.2. I did that because hubs don’t segment a network; they just connect network segments. Basically, it’s an inexpensive way to connect a couple of PCs, and again, that’s great for home use and troubleshooting, but that’s about it!

      As our planned community starts to grow, we’ll need to add more streets with traffic control, and even some basic security. We’ll achieve this by adding routers because these convenient devices are used to connect networks and route packets of data from one network to another. Cisco became the de facto standard for routers because of its unparalleled selection of high-quality router products and fantastic service. So never forget that by default, routers are basically employed to efficiently break up a broadcast domain– the set of all devices on a network segment, which are allowed to “hear” all broadcasts sent out on that specific segment.

Figure 1.3 depicts a router in our growing network, creating an internetwork

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