CCNA Semester 2 Day 1 Part 2

In a properly designed network, the job of access control to networked resources resides with LAN switches. Because they are normally the first device encountered by internal users, they are subject to many different types of attacks by those wanting to compromise the integrity of the network. For this reason, great care must be taken when configuring devices to minimize the possibility of compromise and, at the same time, allow them to efficiently move traffic throughout the LAN environment. Although they normally operate at the network access layer of the TCP/IP model and base their forwarding decisions on MAC addresses they are routinely configured to with an IP address to allow remote management. This chapter examines some of the basic switch configuration settings required to maintain a secure, available, switched LAN environment.