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Intro to Networking?
RobAnybody
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I am currently hunting for a tech support job in the Portland area, and I have come to realize that my networking know-how is pretty spotty at best. I have rough understandings of how TCP/IP works, and more often then not I can trouble-shoot simple networking and internet issues, but DNS and a lot of the other acronyms leave me in the dark.
So, does anyone know of a good place to start learning about this stuff? If anyone cares to explain it to me, awesome. But I would be just as appreciative of a good informational website that I can dig through in the wee hours of the morning. Thanks much!
So, does anyone know of a good place to start learning about this stuff? If anyone cares to explain it to me, awesome. But I would be just as appreciative of a good informational website that I can dig through in the wee hours of the morning. Thanks much!
"When a man's hands are even with your head, his crotch is even with your teeth."
-Ancient Dwarfish Proverb
-Ancient Dwarfish Proverb
RobAnybody on
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Basics like DNS = Google + Wikipedia
Did you have a goal in mind or anything?
As for a goal: I need a new job, I have lots of prior tech support experience, but lack network knowledge. I want to know enough so that I can be employable. At the same time, I don't want to just learn some catch-phrases to get me by and then get out of my depth.
So, Wiki and Google to start, and after that, I may be back with some more refined questions. Thanks!
-Ancient Dwarfish Proverb
I recommend taking a lower level job as tech support and working your way up. It's going to be a lot more effective than trying to learn DNS or Exchange server networking from home and getting a job as a network admin, or even assistant network admin.
I came up the same way - windows server/exchange dude - I learned some stuff on my own and pushed my boss to offically learn more / do more. Deshadow makes a good point, but if you don't want to do phone support there are other options.
You know about the A+ cert? Well they also have one called N+. It's all about the basics and as such doesn't carry much weight. The study materials would seem to be exactly what you're looking for - what's bridge, a switch, a router and how do they all talk.
Up from that is the vendor-specific stuff - think upscale MCSE. Cisco is the big one, but depending on where you want to work juniper or one of the other vendors may be a better fit. The cisco CCNA self study kit is a very good place to start and having a CCNA is a minimum for some entry level jobs.
I'm a little over a semester away from a really simple Information Systems Associate's degree, and I intend on getting A+ and N+ over the summer (I've been studying for over a year, but got thrown off my the shitty clerk job I've been doing for the last 8 months).
I got a degree in Criminology. I just knew computers.
The best thing is to start with the state government, or even federal.
They make you take a test to qualify, and will take work experience over college credentials. From there you build your real world experience, then go somewhere else and get paid what is more acceptable then what the state pays.
I got a temp job cleaning PCs and doing inventory. I'm awesome, so I got hired as a PC tech. Hard work and attrition got me where I am now years later. My only cred is experience, a good number of training classes, and my windows 95 MCP (lol). I've been meaning (read: ordered to) get my CCNA/CCNP stuff and I'm half-assed working on that. Sometimes.
I do some hiring, so a datapoint: A degree + a ccna could get you in the door as a junior network guy, but more than likely you'd lose out to a guy with any practical experience. Working as a helpdesk / PC / server tech can help with that and show the higher-ups you can handle stuff. So can doing networking for other small companies. Setting up a network in your garage... not really careing. But setting up a network for a small office or school or something, that's a plus.
Thanks again for the awesome replies, looks like I got the next month or so to get as much of this stuff under my belt as possible.
-Ancient Dwarfish Proverb
From there I moved to a sort of tier 2.5 support, as they liked to call it. I would look through server logs, monitor live traffic on a corba bus (tibco rendezvous) while people were working, etc. to determine if problems were user error, network issues, or bugs in the apps. That same job, after proving myself, allowed me to take over management of a couple apache servers that ran some fairly critical web apps and do development on those apps. During this same job I also returned to college, although that's taking fucking forever with the whole working full time thing. That then led to my current job - officially I'm a sr perl developer (wasn't when I was hired, but am now), but it's a small company and I'm the only technical resource in the US, so I also maintain the local network, do some server administration, manage the switch/load balancer and soon the ibm blades in our US data center.
With the lack of college the thing that has been the biggest help is doing the development and network/server administration stuff on my own as a hobby. I've learned a huge amount doing it - far more than you get out of most schooling, imo (not to say school is not important, as I said, I am going back - you can pm me if you want me to expound on my feelings on schooling and the work environment to give you something to fall asleep to or whatever). It also shows that I enjoy the work and have a desire to learn more about it and improve which can count for more than experience, within reason and depending on the hiring manager.
big networks CAN have very different support needs than small networks. More complexity adds more that can go wrong, and frequently big networks use special custom things that invalidate some of the assumptions you rely upon with small networks.
You probably already knew that, though.
The point, though, is that it'll help to get a solid theoretical understanding of how various protocols work. What is ARP and how does it work? Picture network traffic in terms of packets-inside-packets.
When I send a TCP packet to a host out on the public Internet, the packet on the wire consists of a TCP message inside an IP packet inside an Ethernet packet.
Who is the Ethernet packet addressed from and to? It's from my NIC's MAC address and to the MAC address of my gateway machine. (How did my PC know the MAC address of the gateway machine? It took the IP address supplied, like 192.168.0.1, used ARP to ask the network for the address of that machine, and listened for an ARP reply.)
Who is the IP packet addressed from and to? It's from my IP and to the destination IP out on the public Internet -- NOT to my router's IP.
That kind of thing.
Next, actually build a complex network and see if you can figure out how to make things work. Get VMware and Windows 98 and/or Slackware Linux 11 (or whatever you like AND have enough RAM to run many copies of) and make a virtual network of machines with several layers of routing between the border gateway and the public Internet. Now start making things work. Oh crap this machine can resolve DNS queries but these machines can't. How do I fix that? This machine three routers deep needs to accept incoming TCP packets -- how do I map incoming connections through multiple layers of NAT?
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