First off, howdy and welcome to the inaugural post of the EtherGeek blog. My name is Josh Stephens and I’m Head Geek and VP of Technology at SolarWinds, an IT management software company in Austin.

I like to think of the transport layer as the layer of the OSI Model that enables more interesting traffic. While we network engineers may love a lot of the simpler uses of the IP protocol and ...

Getting started on designing a network is a task of formidable proportions, but all the more so if you are looking to build a secure IT network. Often, IT system administrators are not fully familiar ...

From the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model shown above, answer the following items: 1. Which layer encapsulates the segment into packets? 2. Which layer of the OSI model supplies services that ...

Peeling back the layers of IoT devices reveals most of them are nothing more than what are already on the Internet in the form of present-day M2M devices. In just six years, according to Cisco Systems ...

We recently advised that people in the business of planning, building and supporting computer networks should not lose sight of the mythical OSI Layer 8. We define Layer 8 as the human-to-human ...

A reference model is a virtual model which defines how communication should take place. It logically divides the processes which are required for the communication into layers. This concept is known ...

This article examines netstat and some of it many outputs, in relation to the open systems interconnect (OSI) model. A quick examination of netstat's man pages provides a description of the program: ...

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) provides for digital transmission over ordinary telephone copper wire as well as over other media uses. In this continuation of his tip on ISDN ...

Open System Interconnection, a layered model for network transport and applications. For instance, the seventh layer in the OSI model—the Application layer—defines program to program communication, or ...