Network Administration... what to know?

R

Rajin

n00b
Joined
Jul 23, 2006
Messages
24
Hello all,

I am currently a student entering my third year (junior) going for a Bachelors in Technology for Network Administration. So far I learned about Ethernet, OSI Reference model, cabling plant setups, EIA/TIA cabling standards, IEEE standards (frames and the such). This semester (August aka Fall semester) these are some of the topics i'm going to learn: (taken from the textbook)


  • Wiring and cable testing issues
    Transmission encoding techniques
    Dissecting the IEEE 48-bit MAC address
    The impact of different types of broadcast traffic
    Operational details and analysis considerations for switches
    Ethernet and Token Ring operational details and analysis
    The IEEE 802.2 LLC protocol (explored in full)
    Datagrams and routing
    IP specifics, including addressing, subnets, and the role of ICMP
    IPX operation and analysis
    UDP, TCP, SPX, and SPX II protocol analysis
    How different protocols find resources via NetBIOS, SAP, and DNS
    Logon sequencing for various protocol stacks
    DHCP, SMB, NCP, NFS, FTP, HTTP, and NT Browse protocol analysis and troubleshooting
    Baselining throughput and latency, including understanding the "latency wedge"

I have more to learn in my spring semester and consecutive fall. But soon after I will be going for my internship (sometime in spring/summer 08').

I was wondering what else I should know going into this field. I currently have an A+ certification and currently in the process of self-teaching myself for the CCNA exam. What topics should I know/perfect.... be ready for in the field? Would greatly appreciate any and all advice/tips!!

Thank you all,

Rajin
 
Rajin said:
What topics should I know/perfect.... be ready for in the field?
Click to expand...

Hopefully you'll get some of this in your internship - but dealing with customers/clients is something you'll need to learn. How to deal with people in a language that isn't techinical but isn't talking down to them. This, I've found, is one of the harder things for techs to learn.
 
While this is not strictly my field I would suggest getting as familiar as possible with the related software. The tweaks and tunables, servers, configs, firewall solutions, operating systems, and in general everything that will emit/process/filter/mangle and/or crash on the packets you're studying.
Being able to e.g. throw together a *BSD box to filter and prioritize traffic (at least until you can dig up something suitable from cisco) or knowing how to set up and run a DHCP server on linux are likely to be useful skills some day, even if it's a bit on the side of what you're studying.

Besides, if you get your programming skills up to par, there's probably a number of projects that would love a coder with networking expertise. :)
 
Don't forget the cardinal rule of being a good tech/admin. You don't have to know EVERYTHING, but you do need to know where to look for the answer and how to apply what you find!
 
Nate7311 said:
Don't forget the cardinal rule of being a good tech/admin. You don't have to know EVERYTHING, but you do need to know where to look for the answer and how to apply what you find!
Click to expand...
Amen. :)

Just be sure to have some decent customer service skills -- our server admin team is quite notorious for not having such and I think my head honcho is looking to replace them soon as a result.
 
Nate7311 said:
Don't forget the cardinal rule of being a good tech/admin. You don't have to know EVERYTHING, but you do need to know where to look for the answer and how to apply what you find!
Click to expand...


And closely related: You don't have to know everything, but you should have a rough idea what it's for. That way, you'll know what to look into if you need to do something new.
 
Another MUST: dont act like you know everything. That right there will take you places.
 
Know everything you can about as much as you can and continue to learn all the time but don't act like you know everything and you'll be in a really good spot. Just work on speaking without using "techy words". Best way I can do it, is act like it's your grandma you're talking to. Dumb it down but don't make them fell dumb.
 
To emphasize what everyone else said, make ABSOLUTELY sure you can teach technical subjects to non technical people. Make comparisons to things they understand.

For example, I had to explain port forwarding to a group of non tech people. I couldn't tell them that all 10 computers on their network were behind one ip address and that different ports would be forwarded to each one. They'd have no idea what I was talking about.

I told them to think of their network as an 800 number. They dial one number (ip address) and then to reach a certain user they put in their extension (port) and got forwarded to the proper person (computer).

These are the skills that will get you a job. Anyone can configure a network. Not everyone can talk to people.
 
Hello,

Thanks everyone!! I appreciate everyone's responses. Yeah when I was in my networking course; one of our projects was to describe a networking technology in simple language. Also when I was in my A+ cert course we did a lot of customer relation exercises. But I know that these are some of the core values and theres always room to get better; which I still try to perfect them today with friends and the such.


Again thank you all.
 
try to remember everything you can, if your running say server 2003, read the resource kits,.. And remember what everyone else said on this thread, lot of great stuff
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top