I started a blog in 2008, which was all about training, mostly on CCNA. As time went by, the blog lost a lot of traction. When Cisco launched its forum, it became much harder to beat cisco.com for SEO on Cisco-related content. Anyway, I digress. I noticed last week that the blog is now getting an enormous amount of traffic (16k per month), but it's running on WordPress, which is as slow as a snail. Over the weekend, I started moving all the articles onto a new platform, and it's FAST! SUPER FAST! It's still hosted in my house, but my goodness, Ghost is SO much quicker than WordPress. Go see for yourself, https://www.anythingoverip.co.za <-- This is the old site running on Wordpress (please excuse the deadlinks and the fact you can see I neglected it for some time) Here is the new and improved version https://blog.anythingoverip.com <-- this is the new home for the blog posts. There are about 70 posts related to CCNA, so feel free to scan through them to see if you find anything of interest. If anything doesn't make sense, ping me in this group. BTW - the WordPress site is running caching locally, and it's running caching through Cloudflare. The new site is running NOTHING; it's just an out-of-the-box installation of Ghost at this point. I have not enabled ANY caching. Both sites are running inside my house on the same server. Both are Docker containers behind Traefik. So this really gives a great indication of all things being equal, Ghost is kicking butt! My questions to all of you, even though it's not CCNA related. Are any of you running WordPress, Ghost, or other blog platforms? Are any of you using Docker, and to what extent?

Wohoo, we broke 20 members, and in under 2 weeks. I'm excited to see how we can grow this community and help even more people succeed in their training journeys! Don't be shy, drop a comment or a post and tell me/us what you are struggling with, or share something you have learned recently. I've been doing this for almost 30 years, and I still learn something new every day!

Scenario: You've been called to troubleshoot connectivity issues at a small office. The network admin configured static NAT for their web server so external clients can access it, but nobody can reach the server from the Internet. Here's what you find: Router(config)# ip nat inside source static 10.0.1.10 203.0.113.50 interface GigabitEthernet0/0 description INSIDE ip address 10.0.1.1 255.255.255.0 interface GigabitEthernet0/1 description OUTSIDE ip address 203.0.113.1 255.255.255.0 The web server (10.0.1.10) can ping the router's inside interface. External clients can ping 203.0.113.1 (the router's outside interface). But nobody can access the web server at 203.0.113.50. ❓ Question: What's wrong with this configuration? Drop your answer below! 👇 Bonus points if you can: Explain WHY it's not working Show the correct configuration 💡 Hint: It's a common mistake that catches a lot of people on the CCNA exam!

Thanks to @Aljon Ruanto for his question related to VLANs. I've created this video to explain VLANs and a little bit more. As always, if there are any questions, please let me know and I'll do my best to respond as quick as I can.

VLANs are one of those topics that seem complicated until they suddenly click. Let's make that happen today. Why VLANs Exist: Without VLANs, you'd need a separate physical switch for every broadcast domain. That's expensive and inefficient. VLANs let you create logical segmentation on a single switch. The Business Case: - HR Department: Needs privacy for sensitive data - Guest WiFi: Should be isolated from corporate resources - VoIP Phones: Require QoS prioritization - Finance: Must comply with data separation requirements One switch, four VLANs, four broadcast domains. Problem solved.