Today’s class was just chock full of information, and boy am I glad that I did that little bit of Binary review yesterday. The class was over-all quite a bit longer than yesterday’s class and at first seemed very daunting, but the feeling of finishing it is inexplicably great. Just how there are easy classes like yesterday’s binary reviews, we also have difficult classes that we may not quite understand all the way through and will have to go back to review some parts in order to get a better understanding. With this in mind, I am no exception. There was a lot of information about Subnet Masks that I’m going to have to take a look at before beginning the next section of our CCENT course.

In our Introduction to IP Addressing we started out by going over the basics such as: What is an IP Address? An IP Address is the mechanism we use to deliver messages from one device to another device. We then went deeper to discuss different portions of an IP address. There are two major portions to an IP address which are called the Network Portion, and the Host Portion. The lecturer gave a fantastic analogy referring to how this is similar to addressing a letter. The host portion of an IP address is very similar to a street address we would put on our envelope. The network portion is similar to the zip code we include to say a more generalized area we are sending our letter.

We then dove into the real meaty parts of IP addressing when we started to discuss subnetting! Subnetting brings us back again to how important being able to convert decimal to binary really is in networking, because, we absolutely HAVE to be able to break down a decimal IP address in order to subnet and mask.

We then very briefly talked about Classless Addressing, which was used from 1995 to current day, and then we went into a little bit of describing what Classful Addressing is, which we used prior to 1995, and is only used today for teaching purposes. The next thing we learned about was address types, “Network”, “Host”, and “Broadcast”, as well as how to identify these address types when looking at an IP address in decimal, binary, and subnet form.

The last part of class was about IP Address Configuration and Verification. If you’re like me and you love to jump into the command prompt. Maybe you even dream of looking at that beautiful black backdrop with white letters and numbers all over the place, you’ll absolutely love being able to do the exercise at the bottom of today’s notes. There was something that was just so satisfying about finally taking a look at our ipconfig in the command prompt and being able to actually recognize and know what we’re looking at! I’m sure a lot of you have had some sort of experience taking a look at ipconfig in order to find your IP address to change something on your wireless network whether it be putting a password on it, or making sure that all the devices that are on your network should be there.

So that wrapped up our Introduction to Networking. The next part of our series will be CCNA: Initial Router and Switch Configuration. Because I have a little bit of review left to do on this last class, tomorrow I’ll be talking about something everyone struggles with at some point or another when at-home studying for certifications. Whether it be your CCENT or CCNP, we all have times when we’re just not sure if we want to go further and I’d like to share with everyone some of my personal philosophies, goals, and ideas that keep me pushing every day. Thank you so far for joining me on my adventure to CCENT!

Don’t forget to check out the exercise in today’s notes!

Notes day 6