I’ve been slowly working my way though a list of skills to learn, both to put on my resume and as personal growth. Networking is the next thing on this list. I am not sure what I am looking for, but I want to start another project. I have built many a personal computer, but the world of networking is a pretty foreign concept to me.
I have experience with building computers and a minor glance at the network-side of things. I’ve set up a Pi-Hole or two and set a basic CUPS server up on a RPi0w, but beyond that, I have no idea what I’m doing, or even what the possibilities are. I just see posts like this and think that it’s a pretty cool hardware project.
Is there any resources you recommend to start learning, maybe what the hardware does? From my outsider’s perspective, I see a lot of people’s racks have at least a router, switch, and firewall, along with various other machines.
E: thank you all for the suggestions! I’ll have to take some time to figure out what to do first
I mean, isn’t it important to understand the fundamentals so you can understand VLSM better?
Like math, a lot of this knowledge works better when you know the fundamentals and basics, which help you conceptualize the bigger ideas.
On a personal level, I would have had a lot harder time understanding VLSM if I hadn’t had the basic fundamentals of traditional subnetting and classful networking under my belt.
There’s nothing inherently important to classful networking you learn that’s necessary for VLSM. They amount to common convention based on subnet size, and even then nearly nobody actually uses A or B sized subnets except as summary routes, which again, is not inherent to classful networking.
Classful networking has been obsolete for thirty years for good reason, you gain nothing from restricting yourself in that way.
How are you “restricting” yourself by learning that it exists? Nobody is saying “learn about it and use it and never consider anything else.” They asked what fundamentals they should know for networking, and I dumped what I considered the “fundamentals.”
Nothing actually uses classful networking anymore. Any situation where classful network concepts are implemented is necessarily limiting the capabilities of the network. As such it’s completely useless to bother spending time learning it.