Overview

This chapter compares connection-oriented and connectionless protocols; commonly used protocols are categorized accordingly. This chapter also provides an overview of some basic protocol characteristics. It is important that you have a basic understanding of these common protocol characteristics in order to be able to effectively troubleshoot networks.

Knowing how to interpret protocol analyzer output to decipher frames on your network is crucial. Valuable information can be derived from capturing frames on your network segments. Catalyst switches have 'span' capabilities that allow you to view the frames from multiple LAN segments at once. With protocol analysis you are looking at the content of the actual frames on a network to search for rogue frames or traffic distribution patterns - this can be compared to a neurologist using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to diagnose a patient.

This chapter completes the setting of the foundation for the remainder of the curriculum. From here you can independently launch into most of the subsequent chapters (with minor exceptions which may require you to bounce around a bit).