Cisco CCNA 640-802 / CCENT Certification Exam Training: Frame Relay LMI And LMI Autosense


by Chris Bryant - Date: 2007-11-18 - Word Count: 340 Share This!

For success on your CCNA 640-802 and CCENT exams, you need to understand how and why Frame Relay LMI messages operate. You need to know this for real-world networking as well, since Frame Relay is prevalent in today's networks - and without LMI, you have no Frame Relay!

The Local Management Interface (LMI) messages are sent between the DCE, typically the service provider, and the DTE, the Cisco router.  LMI Status messages serve as keepalives for the frame connection.  If keepalives are not continually received by both the DCE and DTE, the frame connection will drop.  The LMI also indicates the PVC status to the router, reflected as either active or inactive.

The LMI types must match on the DTE and DCE for the PVC to be established. There are three types of LMI: 

Cisco (the default)

ansi

q933a

The LMI type can be changed with the frame lmi-type command. Before doing anything with the frame relay commands, though, we have to enable frame relay on the interface with the encapsulation frame-relay command.  Remember, the default encapsulation type on a Cisco Serial interface is HDLC.

R1(config)#interface serial0

R1(config-if)#encapsulation ?

  atm-dxi      ATM-DXI encapsulation

  frame-relay  Frame Relay networks

  hdlc         Serial HDLC synchronous

  lapb         LAPB (X.25 Level 2)

  ppp          Point-to-Point protocol

  smds         Switched Megabit Data Service (SMDS)

  x25          X.25

R1(config-if)#encapsulation frame-relay

R1(config-if)#frame-relay lmi-type ?

  cisco

  ansi

  q933a

We can hardcode the LMI type as shown in that example, and there's another way to get the LMI to match with the remote DCE. LMI Autosense has the router send out an LMI Status message for all three LMI types.

The router then waits for a response for one of those LMI types from the DCE.  When the router sees the response to its LMI Autosense messages, the router will then send only the same LMI type it received from the DCE.

On rare occasions - such as your CCNA exam, perhaps :) - the Frame LMI may not match. We'll take a look at such a scenario in the next installment of my exclusive Cisco CCENT / CCNA 640-802 certification exam tutorial series!

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com


Related Tags: certification, training, exam, frame, and, ccna, cisco, relay, 640-802, ccent, lmi, autosense

Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage (http://www.thebryantadvantage.com ), home of free CCNA and CCNP  tutorials, and The Ultimate CCNA and CCNP Study Packages.

 

For a copy of his FREE "How To Pass The CCNA" or "CCNP" ebook, visit the website and download copies! Our new RSS feed gives you free Cisco questions and tutorials daily!

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: