Wes's suggestion is excellent. If you can, lay your hands on a small router like a Cisco 2600 and learn IOS. Configure up your network in different ways to learn networking fundamentals - set up a class A, Class B, and Class C network, then do it using variable length subnet masks, etc. Set up a VPN, play with DHCP, RIP, and OSPF (if you can), and firwalls - 90 percent of security management is network administration. Download network and systems management tools. Many that are not free have 30 to 60 day timebomed versions that are full-featured. Get to know sniffers, SNMP managers, anything, everything. On the linux side check out snoop, openNMS, UCD SNMP, and others. if you have a Sun or NT box, you can download an evaluation copy of HP OpenView Network Node Manager - all the OpenView documentation is online and you can learn a lot from reading docs even without the software. Other vendors offer white papers that explain a lot of fundamentals - you can probalbly spend days at cisco.com, for example. Subscribe (for free) to the trade rags like Internet week, Network World, etc., and/or surf those sites for archived articles - many puplish articles explaining fundamentals. One of the most educational experiences for me (other than installing and networking linux boxes) was getting cracked. Seriously - you can learn a heck of a lot about network administration by understanding all it takes to install and configure an IRC chat bot on the sly - more than commercial experience imho. Many security sites give you windows into this world legally. hth, Mike (a network managemernt consultant by trade) ----- Original Message ----- From: Wesley Allen <wallen@mail.lexchristian.org> To: <wlug@mail.wlug.org> Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 3:48 PM Subject: Re: [Wlug] Question
Do a home network and hack it together. The sugguestion about getting involved in help-desk work is really good too because all of the sudden you HAVE to learn all this stuff so you can help people (though you may go insane doing it, "I've got 600 messages in my "saved" box on the mail server, should I have backed these up on my local machine?"). If you've got a friend who is a system admin start talking to them as you hack your network, this will have to be a good friend who will not mind giving you advice for free that he charges other people for; but friends can put into English what man pages can only put into "networkspeak", without friends, I'd never even tried to learn linux and would still be a slave of Microsoft. Wes
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Frank Sweetser <fs@WPI.EDU> Reply-To: wlug@mail.wlug.org Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 14:57:27 -0400
On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 02:25:15PM -0400, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
I've seen good comments made about:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471345865/qid=997293880/sr=1-24/ref= sc_b_24/102-6048261-3490524
Also ISBN 0-201-43319-2
-- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu, fs at suave.net | $ x 15 Full-time WPI Network Tech, Part time Linux/Perl guy | P.S. Perl's master plan (or what passes for one) is to take over the world like English did. Er, *as* English did... -- Larry Wall in <199705201832.LAA28393@wall.org> _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug
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