Cisco CCNA — Networking Fundamentals
Network security without networking depth fails at interview round 2. Bangalore firewall hiring panels probe OSI layers, VLANs, routing, and NAT before they ask one Palo Alto question. Month 1 wires CCNA-level depth into every later vendor topic.
- · OSI 7-layer + TCP/IP — packet flow end-to-end
- · IP addressing + VLSM subnetting (whiteboard fluency)
- · VLANs + 802.1Q trunking + inter-VLAN routing
- · Static + RIP + OSPF basics — administrative distance, metrics
- · Spanning Tree Protocol — root election, port states
- · ACLs (standard + extended) — the foundation for every firewall rule
- · NAT/PAT — directly maps to firewall policy NAT
Build a multi-VLAN enterprise LAN with inter-VLAN routing, ACL policy, and NAT on real Cisco Catalyst 9300 + ISR 4331 hardware via vpn.networkershome.com.
3-tier campus with security ACLs at distribution layer + documented packet flow diagrams.
"Walk me through ACL processing order on a Cisco router and how it differs from Palo Alto's policy evaluation." — answer covers top-down with implicit deny vs PA's session-based with negate logic.