Misc. Flashcards
What is the newest IEEE WiFi standard and what frequency bands does it operate on?
WIFI-7 aka 802.11be = the latest WiFi standard with speeds up to 46Gbps, 320MHz channel width (double WIFI-6).
It operates on the 2.4/5/6GHZ frequency bands.
What is band steering?
Band steering = WAP feature to optimise device connections/speeds = Directing clients connected to a WAP (Wireless Access Point) to the best frequency e.g. 2.4GHz if the 5GHz band is busy or has weak signal.
What is the point of the 802.11h WiFi standard?
802.11h is a regulated wifi standard that forces WiFi capable devices/routers to have certain features:
-DFS = Dynamic Frequency Selection - the ability to detect and avoid frequency conflicts
-TPC = Transmit Power Control -regulates the power level of WiFi transmissions.
What is a direct wireless connection between two devices, without using a WAP (WirelessAccessPoint) called?
IBSS (Independent Basic Service Set) or Ad hoc - connection.
Ad hoc = network configuration where devices are directly connected to each other for a particular purpose. Peer 2 Peer (P2P) connection/no AP’s or routers. E.g. bluetooth to connect to an IoT device.
What is the BSSID? What two things is it comprised of?
BSSID is the unique identifier for a network device used to tell devices with the same SSID (given name) apart by other devices on the network.
BSSID is made up of the device MAC address combined with the SSID.
SSID + MAC address = BSSID
What is an ESSID?
ESSID - Extensible SSID = allows seamless roaming between multiple configured WAP’s on the same network.
As soon as you get in range of a new better signal WAP the BSSID (MAC address+SSID) is gathered and connected to.
What are active and passive devices in terms of providing network redundancy?
Active device is the one in use whereas the passive one is the one on standby to take over should the active device fail (failover) thereby providing network redundancy and minimising any down time.
Configuration and real-time session information like the routing table is constantly synchronised between these two devices so the failover can happen at anytime.
Can have an active-active setup but requires more setup (and higher setup costs). I.e. two active firewalls where only outbound traffic goes through one firewall and inbound traffic uses the other exclusively. This still provides redundancy and balances the network load.
What is IPAM - Internet Protocol Address Management?
IPAM is a software/suite of tools to centralise the management of IP addresses within your network. E.g. manage DHCP reservations or link users to IP addresses and keep track of how many IP addresses in the range are available, etc.
What’s an SLA?
Service Level Agreement (SLA) - is an agreed upon minimum level of service between a client and a provider. E.g. it may stipulate a 99.5% minimum infrastructure uptime or less than 2 hours unscheduled downtime per week, etc.
What’s a site survey?
An assessment to evaluate Access Point locations, wireless landscape (heat map, WiFi map), any dead zones, temperatures, humidity etc. Basically all site conditions related to IT. This can then be used to optimise service by using frequencies that aren’t in use, plan where to put MDF and IDF.
What is a golden or baseline configuration?
Predefined/working/ideal/stable setup for a system.
You can roll back to or compare against this golden configuration is a problem arises with your production configuration.
What does NetFlow protocol do?
NetFlow gathers detailed statistics regarding data flow over the network/monitors network traffic for performance, troubleshooting and security monitoring. This collected data is then sent from all physical taps/switch port analysers to a NetFlow Collector which then stores the summary of data statistics and creates graphs etc as needed.
SolarWinds is a NetFlow analysis tool to process and visualise such NetFlow device data.
What is SIEM?
A way of collecting syslog data from various network devices to manage security and error logging from a centralised SIEM - Security Information Event Management (e.g. Splunk).
SIEM allows for real time alerts, long term storage of events/logs, analysis over time for network events.
SIEM can be configured to only capture certain messages/data.
What is Availability Monitoring?
Availability monitoring = tracking whether a device is reachable or not/up or down. Can set alarm to trigger if an interface becomes unreachable. Can be tracked over time.
What is an RTO?
RTO - Recovery Time Objective = a measure of how long (time) it takes after an outage/disaster to get back to a normal operating service level.
RTO = how long to get back up and running again.
(Lower the better).