No. 27251Anonymous 30th August 2019 Friday 4:14 pm27251Practical Networking primers and such
Not too long ago I managed to land myself a position as some sort of a systems administrator / network engineer at a small to medium local ISP in the middle of nowhere.
I'm moderately familiar with their network from the tech support days in the same company. I've dabbled with Linux and *BSD systems before, these don't scare me really.
I've also read Tanenbaum and Olifers' books about networks.
All of this helps immensely though at times I feel like I only barely manage to keep myself from drowning. I can coast along like this a few years, I think, yet I'd prefer not to.
Recommend me something hands-on, please. I've identified at least a few areas where I suck, these include: interoperability between Layer-2 and Layer-3 technologies, routing [0], gateways and firewalls. For the latter, whilst I have a rather clear idea how to firewall an endpoint, I struggle with firewalling transit nodes.
As an example, Network Warrior - I don't remember the author - was good.
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[0] Whilst having a basic idea how it works and what protocols do what, I only vaguely understand how I'm supposed to debug routing issues. Also, BGP and iBGP stuff.
To clarify about L2/L3 inter-op a bit, one particular problem I've grappled with included passing transit traffic in a dedicated vlan id through the edge router. There, it had to exit the network via what I understand to be a L3 interface.
It boiled down to setting up bridge domains or whatever its name was. I smashed together a config using a similar one for another VID but bugger me if I undestood what I did.
