Damion Alexander wrote: > Greetings, > > I just added the networking group (better stated: person) to my newly > formed group of Sys Admins. I am pretty savvy with Systems, but I can > only play a network person on TV. > > Could someone point me in some good directions to get up to speed on > networking (we use all cisco gear) so that I can truly support my > networking person? > > I'm decent with the levels 4 and above of the OSI networking model, but > my knowledge starts to plummet below that. I would like to be able to > discuss our current network design, and ways to improve it. Also being > able to assist on network problems would be good too. > > Thanks in advance, > > Damion > _______________________________________________ > I'd recommend old school. "Internetworking with TCP/IP" or "TCP Illustrated". You can probably find a used copy somewhere online. Either one is excellent, and things aren't that different today from years ago when they were written.
Things that are a must to understand: ARP IP routing (packet forwarding, choices, masks, etc.) CIDR masks broadcast vs unicast and how it works and what it does. It will not cover vlans, per se, but that's just a way to carry different broadcast domains in a more flexible manner and can usually be figured out by reading the Cisco manual. It does take some mental getting used to the notion of tagged and untagged and when to use which. (untagged = computer/device port, untagged = a transit port that moves >=1 VLAN through your network). You'll also want to learn about SNMP, and probably OSPF. Both can be covered in the books above fairly well, usually in the second volume. They are multi-volume sets. things that you will probably find useful right away: show cdp neighbor (if enabled, provides useful information for you to discover topology and neighbors). show ip route <x> (no options shows entire table) show arp <options> show cam <options> show ver - shows you info about the router. When you are introduced to enable mode, "show run" is also useful, though your network folks probably have some place where the switch and router configs are archived. Find out what that place is and you can learn a wealth of info about what is configured. Good luck!. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
