Cisco CCNA Certification Exam Practice Questions:

Switch Operations, ARP, Broadcasts, And More!

By Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933

To help you along in your CCNA certification exam studies, here are ten free questions dealing with switching, ARP, broadcast addresses, and more. Enjoy! Answers are posted at the bottom of the page.

1. When a frame enters a switch, the first value the switch looks at is the ____________.

2. A switch receives a frame with a unicast destination MAC, but the switch does not have an entry for that MAC in its bridging table. What is the default action of the switch?

A. The switch will send an ARP Request for the MAC address of the destination.
B. The switch will forward the frame out every port, except the one it came in on.
C. The frame is sent out any port that the switch has no MAC table entry for.
D. The frame is filtered.

3. A frame enters a switchport. The destination MAC address is known. Which of the following terms best describes how the frame will be transmitted?

A. The frame is unicast.
B. The frame is multicast.
C. The frame is broadcast.
D. The frame is flooded.

4. What criteria does the switch use to build a dynamic MAC table?

A. ARP.
B. RARP.
C. Source MAC addresses.
D. Destination MAC addresses.

5. A frame comes into a switch on port fastethernet 0/1. The switch does a lookup on the destination MAC, and sees that the destination is also found off that same port. What action describes how the frame will be handled?

A. The frame is filtered.
B. The frame is broadcast.
C. The frame is unicast.
D. The frame is multicast.

6. What is the MAC address used for a broadcast? Short answer - no choices given!

7. What criteria does port-based security use to allow or deny access to a switch port?

A. The password configured on the switch port.
B. The password configured on the user's PC.
C. The source MAC address.
D. The destination MAC address.

8. What are the three modes of port-based security?

A. Restrict
B. Stop
C. Shutdown
D. Protect
E. Yellow
F. Green
G. Crisis
H. Red

9. What is the basic purpose of Spanning Tree Protocol?

A. STP prevents switching loops.
B. STP prevents routing loops.
C. STP assigns port costs in an effort to select the best paths.
D. STP prevents collisions on an Ethernet segment.

10. Which of these best describes the transition states of a port running STP?

A. blocking > listening > learning > forwarding
B. blocking > learning > listening > forwarding
C. blocking > listening > holding > forwarding
D. blocking > holding > listening > forwarding

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Here are the answers to these Cisco CCNA switching questions!

1. The switch first examines the source MAC address in order to determine whether an entry for that address is already in the MAC address table.

2. The switch will flood a frame when it has no entry for that frame's destination in its MAC table. Flooding a frame means that it's sent out every port on the switch except the one it came in on.

3. When the destination MAC is known, the frame is unicast.

4. Switches use source MAC addresses to build a dynamic MAC table.

5. If the source and destination are found off the same port, the frame is filtered - it is not sent out any port on that switch, because the switch will just drop the frame.

6. The MAC address for a broadcast frame is FF-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF.

7. Port-based security uses the source MAC address of the frame to make its decision on whether to forward the frame or not. The source MAC address is basically a password in this situation.

8. The modes of port-based security are restrict, shutdown, and protect.

9. The basic purpose of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is to prevent switching loops.

10. A port running STP and that is brought out of blocking state will go from blocking to listening, then to learning, then finally to forwarding. "disabled" is officially the fifth STP state according to Cisco's website, but you will not see "disabled" as an STP state on a switch.

To your success,

Chris Bryant

CCIE #12933

chris@thebryantadvantage.com