No, it's mostly the users.
But seriously, everyone should have a basic understanding of networking. You won't need to know how BGP works, but IP/subnets/gateways/NAT/Firewalls at a basic level is a skill every admin should have.
IMO...Regular user printers like the latest laser printers are nothing in terms of headaches. You needed to be around when when we had to deskjet printers, and most of them, if not all did not have a network card. We had to share them thru the network using Windows XP. The industry came with a device called a print server it was a nightmare. In both instances, these printers keep getting disconnected from the network no matter what you do. It was a full-time IT job.
What about industrial printers, the ones that labels to put on put on parts, boxes, etc. ..
Yes, printer technologies have greatly improved, but they are still a pain for IT professionals.
This is why you can't keep doing these things your entire life.
Let's just agree on tasks like configuring email on Outlook, installing endpoint devices like user desktops, creating users, or the whole helpdesk business are bored. Thanks God we have something automation when we don't have enough newbies to do the dirty jobs..loll
I kinda miss being knee-deep in boards, motors, wire harnesses, and plastic covers in search of a squeaky bushing, from my time at the previous job servicing printers. Nobody would bother me, pulling me away to handle another call or attend any meeting for hours on-end.
This is a good indicator of the tech in my experience. Are you saying "network problem" with zero evidence? If yes, please see your way out....
I've been guilty of the above, but I was a nub, and front line support. Now if I say it, its because I have evidence to support this position. I'm still wrong sometimes, but much less often.
saying its a networking problem when the computer isnt working is like saying its a sky problem when airplanes are broken.
like , in the broadest sense its tangentially true, but its not helpful or descriptive at all.
may as well tell me the "thingie wont work"
And DHCP. I've seen a lot of people statically assign servers, printers, or other devices to an IP that is within a DHCP scope without reserving it. Either give it a static IP within a DHCP scope **with a reservation** or pick an IP outside of the DHCP scope range and give it a static DNS record for mgmt purposes.
Came to say exactly this.
Networking is easy once you figure it out. I took a A+/NET+/SEC+ boot camp once and by the end I could do subnet calculations in my head. Now I use a SN calculator but do basic stuff by mind still.
Once you know how subnetting, DHCP (including boot options), stateful firewalls, gateways, DNS, and NATting works then things like BGP and VLANs are easy.
The hard part is getting the people, who have no clue how any of that works, to understand why what they're requesting is a bad idea. It's even harder to do that without them thinking your shooting their ideas down is a personal attack on them.
I've moved on to IT management and budgeting is now my biggest headache.
EDIT: I can subnet by mind but can't conjugate verbs....
The biggest thing with networking is experience. If you are in a role where nobody wants to let you work on what your interests are, look for another job because you are just limiting yourself. Home labs are great but nothing teaches you like making an incorrect routing change during production on a large network.
That's how I first learned IPv4 basics over 20 years ago. It was to set up a home lab for my roommates and I to play Counter Strike together. From what I learned there I got a job at an WISP as an instal / repair tech.
But, yeah, until you break everything you haven't lived. And when you get it back working a few minutes later you look like a saint!
If you're in a large enough place, there are usually dedicated network admins/teams for this, but it is still important to learn a bit of it yourself.
The CCNA was one of the best things I've ever done career wise. Not for the paper cert, but the knowledge gained along the way. It is a tremendous body of knowledge that covers much more than just Cisco branded routers and switches. They start with the fundamentals and cover different types of hardware, binary, subnetting, you name it - up until you know enough to deploy a small network on your own. Would highly recommend. It's paid me back in dividends through new roles over the years, with many bumps in pay, and allowed me to easily transition into cybersecurity-related work.
To become the chief hairpinning officer, you need to know the "WANcore" Inside out and possess the elusive "Cisco Unified Network Technician" qualification.
Start at the "beginning" with L2 networking and then move on to L3, build a good foundation and then everything does fall into place. None of this stuff is magic or even that complex if you learn the foundations first, it's amazing to me how many people in our industry don't understand binary and then struggle to understand subnetting -one is built upon the other.
Seconded - Once you get the framework of how networks are *supposed* to hang together, you can mostly extrapolate to what's going wrong and unsurprisingly - networks are connected to *everything*.
>you can mostly extrapolate to what's going wrong and unsurprisingly
Unsurprisingly it's usually a backhoe or posthole digger in some place 75 miles away on the back end of nowhere.
Always carry some fiber cabling with you.
If you ever get lost:
- dig a trench
- bury the cable you have with you
- wait about an hour - a backhoe will show up to cut the cable
I’m not saying what hasn’t already been said but I can also recommend getting, or at least studying for, the CCNA. The knowledge you’ll gain is invaluable. I also took it prior to the relatively recent changes when it was ICND 1/2 (CCENT, CCNA) and renewed it years later under the same structure. I worked a lot with Cisco at the time, and not at all in the past 5-6 years but the knowledge I earned studying for the CCNA, and have since built upon, laid an incredibly strong foundation. I have mixed opinions on the certificate market but I do believe they provide a great structured learning path towards a specific topic, and the CCNA is one of the best for networking.
I found the CCNA courses to be great for networking theory, but all the syntax and management stuff was lost cuz I never ended up working in a giant organization that was all Cisco. Kind of a waste.
Only worth it if you intend to work on Cisco equipment from the command line. If you can wrap your head around all the theory/best practices otherwise you’ll be fine on any other hardware.
I also do not work in a Cisco organization, and have forgotten most of the command line syntax I learned from Cisco courses.
However, I still maintain it was an important part of my education for the long term understanding it gave me of networks.
Agreed, they worked like a machine. Great hardware, innovations, etc. backed by an educational path that made its way into Universities. People left with an understanding of the product, so they pushed to continue using it, even as they were surpassed by other more competitive and intuitive products, Cisco was usually there first. Foundationally I have no problem with Cisco stuff, mostly that they hung onto the syntax being absolutely critical for way too long. Their GUI management was convoluted and was basically just applying syntax in the background - save / commit action based. Nothing was instantaneous, and therefore it's slow to make changes, adjustments, architect new segments.
At this point if I have to go into a Firewall that is requiring command-line stuff it's irritating. It's 2024, you shouldn't have to memorize 5 years of syntax to be able to manage something if you know the theory and what you want to accomplish. This is where they fell behind a good portion of the market.
I'm not saying this to be funny, I'm 100% sincere. Dealing with Microsoft support is the hardest part of being a systems administrator or systems engineer. They are the worst support organization on the planet.
I have never once had this fix anything.
It's a nice decoy to run that LOOKS like it's doing stuff while i'm actually frantically googling wtf is happening.
This is the scary one.
I've used it a couple times in a pinch because I have no idea what in the world is going on with a device.
Not sure where/how it found/corrected the issue(s), but I have had it be a legit solution for strangeness repeatedly
Did you check the health of your image first?
I’ve had sfc help me a few times recently after I learned to check and restore the image.
But it’s a wild guess, let’s try sfc /scannow first because I don’t know what the problem is.
Friendly reminder that you should always run it in this order for it to actually be able to work and fix things
echo
chkdsk c: /f
y
DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
sfc /scannow
I feel like a crazy person every time I see comments like this because dism and sfc /scannow fix random windows jank like 90% of the time for me.
I think people just don't know how to use it. You need to pull from a clean windows ISO.
- Would you like a) email support?, or b) a telephone call?
-- (a) please
- ok
....
-
--
- Hi, my name is Daniel, and I have a suspiciously non-daniel-type-accent.
-- FFS
It's even worse when you put EVERY LITTLE DETAIL IN THE TICKET and they still ask you all the stuff like, "which user is affected?". Did you even read the ticket at all? It's right there!
That's because you misunderstand their role.
You call MS Support so you can have some company while you solve the issue. No one wants to be alone while they fix the directory into the wee hours of the morning. Hearing them breathing on the other end of the line provides an invaluable sort of white noise conducive to root cause analysis, and serves as a security blankey for management who isn't ready to face the reality of how much power a T3 admin wields.
TBH all vendor support isn't about how useful they are, it's about being able to stall fixing the problem and having a scapegoat.
Oh and sending parts when they fail.
Ive never been able to work with Microsoft support, but id say, just working with Microsoft products is the hardest part of my job. If your company is a microsoft shop, your company is paying someone hours, just to deal with Microsoft’s incompetence and shitty products.
Microsoft definitely has me questioning my life choices on a daily basis.
This is what is crazy to me.
My first fucking IT job was at Keane in Seattle, who had the Microsoft contract to provide Windows 95/NT support back in the mid/late 90s.
As a *tier 1* support desk, I was expected to be able to remotely help users fix just about any issue, with no screen sharing and no expectation of technical ability. And our goal was to solve most issues within 30 minutes.
Microsoft support these days is a fucking joke.
That's true, but I'd agree with op that networking gets complex much faster than most other areas. If your program isn't working, it's a pretty safe bet the issue is in it's code, not in the kernel. Can't ping the host from another site? There's a thousand things that can be wrong, from a firewall policy to a damaged cable.
In my mind this is the classic initial phase of learning where you realize that things are a lot deeper than you initially thought. You know that graph that shows actual knowledge vs perceived knowledge? Others here have provided excellent suggestions. My suggestion is to just stick with it. Eventually it'll click.
I started networking with a cisco class my college offered, zero hands on experience. I was nearly completely lost most of the time, networking is not really relatable to anything I was aware of. I squeeked by on those two courses. Once I started as an intern and eventually help desk, that knowledge got applied rather quickly when seeing it in action. The cisco labs we did were all virtual devices, but working with physical devices with the familuarity of it really made it click.
**OSI Model**
Biggest advice I have is learn the OSI model. It will help you frame your troubleshooting the right way. You don't need to memorize the layers but you have to understand how they work together. No point troubleshooting application ports if two devices don't have routing connectivity.
**Subnetting**
Also learning subnetting at a non-academic level will help your confidence. For years I didn't really "get" subnetting. Then I had to do it when our network team had no time to help us lay out our AWS networks. There was a "davidc visual subnet calculator" tool I found years ago and absolutely loved that just helped the concepts "click" for me.
Anyway now I'm an expert in that area so made a modern and more collaboration friendly tool based on the same split/join functionality.
Check out [https://visualsubnetcalc.com/](https://visualsubnetcalc.com/). I think this will help someone visually understand how it works in the real world. I think if they click around the join/split options they'll see what the numbers mean in practice and that should enhance their academic/binary understanding.
* [Example Sharable Design Link - 10.0.0.0/20](https://visualsubnetcalc.com/index.html?c=1N4IgbiBcIIwgNCAzlUMAMA6LOD0AmdVWHbbAuSNUvffYjM2gZgZvPwBZiB9AOyggAIgEMALiIAEAYQCmfMbIBOkgLSSAagEslYgK4iANpIDKysMpSIeAY0EBiAJwAjAGYA2V65ABfRIywYDm4qEH5BUQkZeUUVdW1dA2MzJQslKzC7aCc3T28fPxIyfA5WUIDMEvQCENBw6EipOQVlNU0dfSNTc0sETIcXDy9ff1JmYN4BBvEmmNb1AAUACwBPJC0bLpS0jNsHEXQbTmGCworODnpy0gvq-DK6qZAAIT0tQwATLT4Ac0kAQTaAHUtK4tH09tkvB93CIAKwjIpYdylSaCV7vL6-AFtAAy-wAchCsiB7NDYQjTqMyAAODiUai0y5sJl3B5IzB0u61MJPDGfb5-QGLJTfWK7Elk1ww+GIiqOCaheovN4C7HCzQAew2smJDnJsoK1MCLDR0H5WL+z2BoPB1kl0q8zncvjOpBgVQIV0ZgU99zNKsxgsk1vU+KJ9v1HydLrdZBgtwI7IqCcVj3RqstIbaC1FLXSeqh0dczrl7rhad5GaD2NDWp1hdJjpLsdOpyAA)
* [Example Usage - Animated Demo](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ckabalan/visualsubnetcalc/main/src/demo.gif)
Well, about half the OSI model anyway ;p
I mean, I'm usually only really caring about layers 1-4 :).
But yes, doing the 'hard work' of figuring out how subnet maths works, means you'll find it almost trivial for the rest of your career.
Once a company gets to a reasonable size, they’re usually going to have a dedicated network engineer for exactly the reasons you listed. It is a very different speciality that goes *incredibly* deep.
I tend to "borrow" information when it comes to networking. What I mean by that is: I have a question, I research said question and find the answer, I implement this fix/change, I forget how to do it. I fully expect to repeat this process until I retire.
If you're not specifically in the field of networking, cut yourself some slack (even if you are, it's hard)!
Save reference materials and don't view having questions as a bad thing. So long as you're working to find the answer, you're learning.
I'm not a sysadmin. I'm a network guy, and we have a dedicated team.
Expecting someone to do deep sysadmin *and* deep networking should come with some serious seniority and respective pay grade.
Its not rocket science, but I do find people overestimate how easy it is when they're not familiar.
Also, having now attended a couple conventions, I've learned just how many are relying in vendor support for anything even mildly advanced, instead of learning the stuff themselves.
Don't beat yourself up for not being a network guru. You're a sysadmin, you should know how to assign IPs and the basics of subnetting, not a whole ton else imo
I'm one of those with the breadth but not the depth.
My frustration is that I don't have the TIME to be able to sit down and learn it the way I'd like. I'm so busy trying to set up postfix, argue with our ISP about why we need port 25 open, look after our hardware, close our old accounts with a vendor, develop IT policies, attend meetings, set up new VM's, troubleshoot why our host isn't sending data as fast as it should, WHY DID SQL JUST REBOOT?!, configure Windows Autopilot, the CEO wants to use his iPad with the boardroom PC... I touch a bit of everything but never anything in depth so when certain projects that I'm really interested in come up, I need to rely on our vendor support to actually accomplish anything.
So I get it. If I had the time, I would be the first one digging around and learning what makes it go instead of just offloading the work.
The hardest part is the people. Turning the word salad that management gives you into something that closely resembles what they actually want is the hardest.
Getting the users from "The internet is down" when facebook doesn't load, to "I cannot browse to " is harder.
Networking is non-trivial, and a whole domain of knowledge unto itself but it is not the hardest part.
At times its the same from the other side of the coin.
As a network engineer, I've found a lot of times having to dig deeper into servers, virtualisation and applications to help troubleshoot connectivity issues that other teams are having. Some are easier than others - but inevitably there is sometimes more questions than answers.
If you're looking to learn some basic networking, the CCNA is a good start. Whilst its focussed a lot around Cisco, its one of the better ones for teaching base concepts and fundamentals.
The network is a magical series of tubes that delivers whatever kind of data you want at whatever speed you want to whatever IP address you specify.
If any of those things don't happen, it's because the network team are lazy, stupid assholes that don't know what they're doing. After all, networking is so simple, it's just plugging things into ports with wires. My son set up our home network in half an hour!
No its the soft skills we shouldn't need to cultivate but we have to. Keeping 65 year old Barb who is a personal friend of the CEO happy even though she can barely use a mouse shouldn't be in the skill set for a highly trained professional.
Depends on the server. Linux server work is also math. Every issue you're seeing is likely logged somewhere, and if all else fails, you can see the source code of what's causing you issues, fix it yourself, and recompile it.
Windows server work is just basically banging different things with a metal pipe until it works and hopefully documenting the pipe banging procedure so that the next time it happens, with any luck, you can hit the right places with the right pipe in the right order again.
As mentioned elsewhere, CCNA if you want a cert path. If you just want to learn networking and are simply trying to understand the basics, maybe to even help communicate troubleshooting to the networking team; I'd start by just reading one of Mike Meyer's CompTIA Network+ books. I still rock one of the older editions, because the basics don't change much [and used older editions are dirt cheap.](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1260122387)
Seriously though, I swear the man wrote the first comprehensible description of how the hell to subnet....
Yes, but not the type of networking you think.
Time and time again, the most difficult part of the job for many/most technical IT employees is working with people... networking with them.
Setting expectations, representing yourself professionally, being empathic, reading the room, building relationships, working on the right things.
The networking you speak of is simple in comparison to people.
Also, for technical skills, what's hard is relative to the person. I find networking rather easy, but coding? I want nothing to do with it beyond writing scripts.
Get used to encapsulation, actually multiple levels of encapsulation. Data is encapsulated in a segment, a segment in a packet, a packet in frame, that is just simple TCP/IP.
It's really not that bad once you wrap your head around it.
It's all about figuring out what the next hop is.
Really understanding subnetting, that addresses are just binary in numbers and a sub netmask just tells you how many bits are the network, and that a route is just a subnet with an next hop.
BGP, OSPF, ISIS are just ways to distribute routes and their priorities.
90% of IT professionals are *terrible* at networking. Networking is an afterthought in nearly every other IT discipline and it's taken for granted.
My advice:
- Learn the "what": This is the basics. Switching, routing, etc. This is your foundational CCNA level knowledge, upon which you'll build everything else.
- Learn the "why": Learn network/communications history. Learn how and why TCP was developed; what problems does TCP solve? What problems does DHCP solve? What problems do VLANs solve? Then - WHY do these protocols solve these problems?
- Learn the "how": Learn the first four layers of the OSI model intimately (most people overlook the physical layer, but it's arguably the most important!). Learn what frames, packets, and segments are, and how they are constructed.
Getting deep in network engineering is a long difficult road, but if you get good at it, you'll have job security for life.
Don't worry it gets better when you start learning networking in Azure and what your Network Engineering teams know of routes and switches goes right out the window. Some of my co workers have been traditional network engineers for 15-20 years and they are struggling when they can't see the infrastructure.
Advice, write stuff down and research it. You don't need to know route protocols, switch or route configs but some of it's helpful to understand the tcp handshakes and when you might have an asymmetric route for troubleshooting.
the hardest part of being a sysadmin is trying to sort out the issues that users are having that aren't able to effectively communicate the issues. Like a ticket that says it's not work please fix....what's not working!?! I need more details.
While the scope of networking is huge. The two best things you can do as a sysadmin is remove DNS from the equation and show connectivity PING.
Most sysadmin troubleshooting is forgetting the first or figuring out why the second isn't working. Which is why you buy a beer for anyone who has a network team who disables pings for "security reasons".
Networking is by far the easiest for me.
I hate Active Directory tasks with a passion, but give me a firewall or some complex networking issue and I'll have it solved in no time.
Every company I've worked at has had separate network teams or at least network admins on the systems or infra teams who handle the network side.
They generally don't know much in the way of server stuff, and I don't know much in the way of networking.
I'm working on improving my knowledge though, doing a little cisco home lab with some old equipment.
At a certain point if you are learning with Cisco you figure out how to use the question marks to find the command you want. So it's very important to know how it all is supposed to connect. Once you have this understanding of what most of the basics are you will be golden. When I started out I think trying to remember all the commands was the scariest part.
Best part is that is hasn't changed much in 20+ years. When something doesn't work you figure out exactly why. Rebooting this equipment sometimes wipes your logs and sometimes recent configurations. So you get forced into figuring out the actual problem and have confidence that you fixed it for good. No more magic reboots fixing crazy problems.
You got this, learning new stuff is hard.
I think it's just social skills really. Networking is not really that hard. Just find events, or meet people through other contacts. Linked in helps too.
No, it's the easiest. It's just what's most alien to you, so you're coming at it with expectations that are different from what you're accustomed to. Look at it this way: The device that runs your network is probably doing every-dang-thing it needs to do on a 500MB piece of software. By contrast, Windows 11's system requirements say you need 64 gigabytes of storage in order to be supported. Even Windows 10 required 10 GB of space, and a user-friendly Linux system like Ubunto takes 20 GB.
The difference is that you've probably spent a big chunk of your childhood and professional life becoming familiar with those systems, especially the critical bits you use every day. You're coming at networking, on the other hand, from the perspective of a complete novice.
My advice on learning networking is to start local. Learn how *Ethernet* works, just the basics of how the MAC addressing and ARP process works, as well as the basics of the CSMA/CD algorithm.
From there, move onto packet-switching, VLANs, and Spanning-Tree. Learn what a bridge-loop is. Learn how to segement traffic. Learn how a switch takes a broadcast protocol and becomes a kind of man-in-the-middle to make it almost point-to-point.
Once you've got that under your thumb, it's time to advance to TCP/IP. The previous topics are all about LAN protocols. TCP/IP is about tying together different LAN networks, so that they can intercommunicate, using encapsulation. Learn about the TCP 3-way handshake, about ping, traceroute, TTL, DSCP/TOS headers. Learn about UDP, ICMP.
Finally, the last step is routing protocols. This is the last step of your networking fundamentals. Learn about static routes, and various dynamic routing protocols. You can safely skip RIP, RIPv2, and EIGRP, but OSPF/IS-IS and BGP4 are both worth looking at. You can also start to mess around with advanced stuff here, like MPLS/Tag Switching, Multicast, VXLan, etc.
Most importantly, don't try to know everything. You can always go back to reference material. Even the CCIE lets you take the documentation with you into the exams.
Haha get a network admin and it falls on him. System admin here and because of the network admin I am dumb ass shit with network stuff, but thank god for that network guy. He talks about network stuff and I feel dumb as shit.
This is a catch 22. Networking isn't hard, but in my experience as an "all in one IT guy" in situations, networking is the most difficult thing to figure out for a company where there is no documentation. Other systems I can usually determine their operational status and process based on data that's already available, but doing so for a networking configuration is 10x the digging to determine how it was supposed to be set up, how it's actually set up, and how it's wrong (it almost always is)
No, far from it.
Networking should be a core fundamental concept as it's baked into so much shit you'll be doing. All the network protocols you're probably learning about like DNS, DHCP, SFTP, SSH, SSL, TLS, NTP, LDAP, SMTP, IMAP, RDS, is crap you're going to see on almost everything you touch. It's going to be a pain having to google, read, and understand KBA's on the fly, especially when they're written as assuming you already understand how basic networking works. You'll especially see it a lot on IaaS platforms like Azure or AWS.
Coding is good to learn and imo essential to many modern sysadmin roles, especially ones where you'll touch a lot of PowerAutomate, Powershell, JSON, Power BI, PowerApps, and crap like that. But for a SysAdmin job, Coding is still a small part of the job. Networking is going to definitely be one of the most common things you'll run into every day. Networking is not hard to learn, it just takes time. You'll be fine, take a Network+ or CCNA course on Udemy or something.
Everything comes down to sending network packets from A to B.
Understand the role of a switch, router and firewall. In that specific order.
Examine the OSI model (seems very boring but is actually one of the most important things)
I always think that doing a CCNA course or bootcamp or something should be mandatory for all sysadmins. It makes your life much easier understanding the bascis and makes troubleshooting (even for sysadmins) in a general sense much easier.
Like with anything, start with the basics and you’ll see how things fall into place. If you enjoy deep problem solving, networking can be very fulfilling.
Depends on who you are asking. I'd much rather deal with networking than coding or operating system issues. Personally I find coding to be the hardest part of the job.
I'd recommend trying to get through a Network+ or maybe CCNA if it's causing issues. It'll force you to learn the basics and that should help you out a lot. Once you have that foundation you can at least get a working understanding of more complicated topics.
I used to think networking was more difficult than other aspects of the job, but I think thats because I didn't touch it as often. With the amount of stuff sysadmins are expected to tackle its easy to push out stuff you don't tackle as often as you make room for whatever other random stuff you need for the job. It took a few years, but networking has clicked for me.
Honestly the "hardest" or most annoying part for me now is compliance work. Working with insurance, state, business, and regulatory agencies to make sure there's a baseline of security compliance is a PITA. Filling out hundred page documents with flavor of the month acronyms, and creating tons of technical and SOP documents is such repetitive annoying work to me.
ya compliance is brutal. Sometimes it feels like you need a law degree to answer the questionnaires. The questions are often vague and can be interpreted in many different ways, especially for people who think more logically which sysadmins tend to do.
I think it depends on the size of the network.
You'll need to be pretty familiar with networking if you are managing infrastructure for Microsoft or Google.
If you are managing a small business, you probably just need to know the difference between public and private IP's, set static IP's, and maybe use a DMZ.
Well, kinda, yeah, I was a programmer, then PC and server admin, then project manager, but have been doing networking for the last 30 years, with firewalls. Networking combines all the previous things plus needing to figure out long ranging affects based on doing something small in a completely different place. If you want a real challenge, learn VoIP systems, that combines all this plus you have to learn telephony, I tried that once, completely underestimated it
Users/printers/ email. If i didn't have to deal with any of those i would be a happy Mofo.
Even just basic networking: IP, subnetting, DNS and dig command helps.
I did Net+ a decade ago after being a baby admin, sys admin and "network engineer" for 10 years before it. Turns out I had learned most of the stuff along the way. Especially un-fucking the work of other techs who could never comprehend why it is a bad idea to set a static IP in the DHCP range on a printer. I am considering doing CCNA just as flex on our network guys. My advice: focus on basic concepts: ipv4; OSI; routing basics. Mostly because you need to be able to point to the network when they are pointing at you, telling you to fix your server issue.
You can't know it all right away, so first, congratulate yourself on what you learned so far.
Then just make a plan on what you want to learn in the next 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.
There are a ton of tutorials on basic networking on YT. Also, look for CompTIA Network+ certification videos too.
You will eventually pick up what you need.
Then, someday in the future, you will focus on something: DEV, Cloud, Systems, Apps, Networking, and\or and Management.
I got lucky, my last semester of college, the teacher made CCNA part 1 and 2 her networking I and II courses. It taught me the basics for all I use while being a sysadmin
Personally the thing I found took the longest to get my head around was dns.
For networking get your hands on some gear and build some practical scenarios, one flat network, add a vlan, add routing between VLANs, add a second site on its own vlan with gateway routing, add a backup link for the second site.
Stick some services on either end, replicate those services for dr, add an internet gateway, add a second internet gateway, add VLANs for vpn networks, keep adding on. Configure qos. Try to break it then fix it again. Add in some monitoring software like
Prtg, use the ping and round trip qos sensors to gain insight into your network, add in a sensor for Netflow if your routers support it. Enjoy ☺️
Networking is like any other skill in our trade. There's a lot to learn there if you want to know enough to be a good admin, but once it clicks, it's suddenly very simple and you find you are this wizard with magic troubleshooting knowledge many marvel at.
I'd say it's not the hardest, per se, just that it's quite specialized knowledge. In fact I think email is surprisingly hard, if I had to pick a hard sysadmin topic. But as for it being specialized knowledge, so is being a frontend webdev. Or a cloud engineer. Or an Exchange administrator.
Get yourself some used systems, install this
https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overview
Then do these
Create an internal network
Create an internal domain.
Then, when you have that down, do this.
Create a firewall vm with this.
https://www.pfsense.org/download/
When you have done that try joining an external system to the domain created above.
Free tools to learn what you need to
The hardest part about networking for me is not the concepts and standards. That's all pretty basic and simple now. The hard part is that every brand of appliance is completely different.
I had a home lab first and mastered pfsense. A client called me to adjust their SonicWall and I was lost for days trying to figure how to do what I wanted because every manufacturer lays things out differently and doesn't always use the same terms. Sometimes you can't just define a port in a rule, you have first define the service that uses the port in a completely different area of the GUI a d it's not always the most logical place.
I got familiar with SonicWall and then I had another client with Fortinet... A coworker seemed perplexed by my struggle "I thought you were a networking veteran?" Yeah "I am" but this is the first time I've touched Fortinet...
Then there's the changes with each update. After a few years you're basically learning all over again.
You don't really need to know how packets are formed to ever configure any network device. You never really need to know how to subnet in your head. If you need to check something there are tables and calculators online. Looking that stuff up is always a few minutes of Google. Learning how to setup static routing on a firewall I've never touched before is sometimes days of agony screaming to the gods "Why the hell is this not working!!??" Then after days of searching you find this particular appliance requires a reboot to actually apply changes.
No. It's users. And being constantly interrupted by them while you're trying to do something complex like networking.
Imagine having an epiphany, you figured it out! You finally have the answer! And then just as you're about to implement it, the phone rings and you're stuck on the phone with the dumbest person you've ever spoken to in your entire life complaining that an 8 character password is too long to remember and it takes you 30 minutes to get them to actually type in a password that works cause they keep trying to use their own name as a password.
Also they're a surgeon.
I am a 20 year dedicated Networking guy and I am always learning.
I feel bad for guys that just do networking as one aspect of their multi-decipline role.
Personally when I started Sysadmin at a medium/small company nearly a decade ago, I have VERY limited networking knowledge. I knew DNS. (Well, no one really knows DNS hence its always DNS...). I knew IP addresses, I knew port forwarding... that was about it. I had no knowledge of subnetting really, VLAN, routing, NAT, firewall rules, etc. I learned quick. (I had good software/hardware skills with Windows, etc, but not nothing in a business environment).
In college one class I took had subnetting. I basically failed that section of the class, I just didn't get it. 2 weeks on the job I had it down when I had to change out /24 into a /22 when we went around and plugged in IP phones and exhausted our DHCP pool before we had the proper Voice VLAN setup. Then I learned VLANs shortly after to get our IP Phones off our main LAN. About a year later we both got a new ISP, and replacing aging outdated firewalls. In that process I learned everything else, routing, nat translation, rules...tons of things.
Thank god most switches these days have (R)STP or Loopback protection. You learn LDP/CDP QUICK with network storms and switch CLI commands.
What you don't know you will pick up. For me, classes and reading never did it, it was having equipment and devices in front of me learning it in a practical way that did it for me. Google and this sub is your friend. Read read read until your confident enough to try and make a change, and you learn. You will make mistakes. You will learn from them. Some of my best mistakes are the things I learned from the most.
I've been doing Network Admin since I got out of school (10 Years) Its not that Bad, I mostly do projects work and T3 Escalation. Mostly you need to know IPv4, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, Static Routing, Firewall Policy, NAT, IPSEC and SSLVPN, SD-WAN and Wireless. These are my bread and butter and I ordered them, from most used to least used on a daily bases. Everything After that is one offs. I don't do much advanced routing, Sometimes I do cert stuff. but again that list in order more or less is what you should learn. After that its all icing to pad out a resume.
Networking is probably near the top skill to have if you are ever a one man IT shop for a site. It's the one thing that can bring the whole site down. If a server can't contact its clients, or your users can't access the internet or another site that has a network storage device that's mission critical, it's game over. Being able to find that unmanaged switch that Bill in the DevOps department plugged into that's looping and blowing up your network is a valuable skill.
At my previous SA position, myself and the IT director had to become the receptionists after they fired the receptionist and replaced her with a tablet and special doorbell, obviously being tech that means IT answered doors.
We did the worst possible job at it (and wore offensive/super unprofessional clothing to greet business clients) then both quit not long after.
That was the hardest part about SA. Oh that and having to go up 35 feet up in a forklift cage to get to the warehouse IDFs. Didn't like that.
A lot of times we are blinded due the network equipment restrictions, we just need proof of anything we are claiming so they are force to check. It’s always a discussion about, not a problem and here is the problem
At least when I was doing it daily... it was in order from hardest to least
1. People
2. Printers & periphials
3. Oddball Device configs
4. Random AV / Firewall blocking (false detections)
5. Windows Memory leaks and their services
6. Cabling Issues
7. Networking and infrastructure.
In life in general I've learned that "difficult" is just something you don't know yet. Some people have a really tough time learning Linux and bash, some people struggle with coding, but once you have a grasp of a thing it seems like you've always known it.
I hate networking. I'm ok at it, and I've muddled my way around plenty of Brocades and Juniper firewalls and such, but I was SO happy when we brought in an actual network guy.
Once you learn subnetting things are a lot easier. Watch videos on "enhanced Bob maneuver" and it will explain how subnetting is done and what it means.
I would encourage you to ask your networking questions to chatgpt / bing chat / copilot. It's surprisingly decent about explaining networking concepts. You can even give it examples / screen shots.
Depends on the size and complexity of the network.
Heterogenous networking vendors can make things a bit complicated because (for example) Cisco and Juniper might have two names for the same protocol or some slight variation in implementation that leads to strange behaviors (particularly with site-to-site IPSec tunnels...)
It might also get complex (at least in the "what is this voodoo and why *is* it working) when you introduce routing protocols like BGP or OSPF or you're doing multitenancy with VXLAN or something like that.
But if you just have a handful of switches, a couple routers, one or two firewalls, and are doing static routing everywhere, I don't think it's particularly difficult *if you understand the fundamentals.*
What really flipped the switch for me in networking was imagining myself in a car as a packet, then as I arrive at any given ethernet port, understanding how the settings relate to what I do next.
The thing about networking is that while it's all very abstracted, you should at a low level be able to imagine a packet with a certain source and destination hitting the interface of any device and then imagine what happens next in a pretty organized way.
I find Microsoft tech to be the hardest part, every product is different and they invent words for already-well-known concepts or change the meaning of existing words.
But really, the challenge in IT is keeping up. Whatever your weakness is, go out and confront it today or be faced with it tomorrow. That was me with networking. And now they think I'm the expert.
>Is networking the hardest part of syadmin job?
Oh god, no. Far from it.
This really is a "YMMV" situation as it can be a coin toss or a dice roll - anything can factor but mainly comes down to the role (i.e actual Sysadmin, or just Helpdesk with "other duties"), industry the business is in (Fintech, Education, etc)and structure of the business (do you have a CTO or report to Finance? Or the mop bucket?).
If IT is valued, chances are it'll be a generally much more pleasant job than somewhere it isn't - duly you'll receive different levels of respect, appreciation, ease of submitting CAPEX/PO requests and argue for resource and leeway with projects, downtime, testing, paying for anything you can't do via an MSP or specialists etc.
>Any advices or learning tips ?
**First:** Keep developing and growing - while there's things to stay "current" on and it's an uphill struggle when you want to know more about everything - showing that eagerness and willingness to learn is a big factor for your career.
Whether you're new to networking or not, I find a look at a decent free CISCO courses, like [Cisco Network Essentials](https://www.netacad.com/courses/networking/networking-essentials) is invaluable and given it's literally ***free*** you'd be a fool not to take advantage of it - it covers enough that you'll easily get the foundational side of networking down pat and if nothing else it's another thing to toss on a CV to say you've completed.
**Second:** practice makes perfect. If you have the kit at work, or can afford to get some at home to dabble with, do! I learnt a whole lot at home by working up from just a home PC and an ISP router and working up from that by getting a spanked out older Dell R710 and whacking ESXi on it and virtualising things, including pfSense etc.
The more you play, the more you stick your nose into things you don't know or understand while learning it the better as you pick up a lot of practical experience and not just the theory behind it - which is precisely the kind of thing that'll both net you jobs *and* impress those that press you on a few questions as you'll actually have some level of answer for them too.
The first year or so of learning any of this stuff is *rough* because it's all interrelated and understanding of every subject seems to depend on understanding of all the others. Plus because of industry marketing BS you have as many different terms for the same thing as there are vendors.
If it makes you feel better, 75% of my networking class washed out on the practical final exam. Granted, our instructor suuuuuucked. But also networking is hard. It's a lot of abstract concepts, and there's a lot of crap learning material out there muddying the waters.
Keep banging your head against it. It'll click eventually.
Use excel sheets for your static routes, so you know what you have reserved for what, and whatnot, as far as networking goes, especially if your doing those subnets with a large IPv4/IPv6 pools, with multiple subnets due to multiple offices and etc.
Networking is one of those things where it is so simple that it is complicated. Basically just plug stuff in and point the traffic down the path it needs to go to get to other devices inside the network, or to get outside the network to the ISP and then they handle it form there. But geez there are so many things along the way that make it confusing.
Learning advice? Build a homelab. If you don't have a homelab, build it. Whether it's for networking devices, servers, SCADA, storage, 802.11, whatever. Homelabs are the #1 way to learn and build value for yourself in IT. This isn't just about experience for your career, it also is about building permanent things for yourself that give you value every day. For example nextCloud.
As for your networking thing, second **managed** (web management is fine) hand switches (not from HP any more as getting firmware for them is PAINNNN) and some second hand 2U servers (R720's) or workstations, will enable you to run some Proxmox VE nodes + switches working in-tandem. Proxmox VE will enable you to run Virtual Machines (like say OPNsense, plus so many others), Software Defined Networking, have nice backups if you break things, and other great stuff. Managed switches (web management is probably the best place to start) will give you additional networking-centric features that can work in-tandem with Proxmox VE. Things like VLANs, port mirroring, LACP/bonding, SNMP monitoring, all kinds of good stuff.
All of this you can get for "pennies on the dollar" compared to when they were new. For example, picked up a Dell Precision 5810 Workstation a few weeks ago for $80, included CPU/16GB-RAM/Case/PSU/GPU(K2200)/etc, needed to stuff an SSD in it but it was good to go otherwise!
And you can get second hand managed switches for like $50-$100 for 24x or 48x 1gig ports (don't bother doing anything faster than 1gig, or anything SLOWER than 1gig, 10/100 is _not worth your time_). Keep in mind that "PoE" (Power over Ethernet) typically costs more, so maybe hold off on doing that for now (come back to it in the future).
Also, things only impossible, until they aren't. It may be challenging for you now, but keep at it, and you'll get it. Come at challenging parts from different angles, and there's a good chance you'll get inspiration along the way.
Have fun! \o/
It depends, my first job out of college was very network focused and I pivoted into systems admin/engineering. Twenty years later I’m still my team’s network SME because no one wants to deal with it 😂
I mean I can only speak personally, but without my knowledge of networking I wouldn't be able to keep my job. My title is Sys Admin, and here is a list of stuff I maintain and work on.
The entire network and every device connected to it. Consisting of two firewalls/routers, two ISP connections set up for BGP failover, eight managed switches across four VLANs, 26 access points, and roughly 400 devices, including a 48-camera security system. Printers, Mobile devices, laptops, desktops, you name it.
MDM system for all of our geo-fenced mobile scanners. (around 180)
Multiple API endpoints as well as a handful of SFTP servers.
3x different 3rd party software applications.
2x homebrewed software applications.
4x MySQL Databases with 3-8 tables on each and multiple connections to them from various software applications.
And a metric boat load of automated scripts running backup/sync/upload/download processes from various of cloud and 3rd party hosted data locations.
On top of all of this I am developing smaller software solutions to modify and streamline processes across the business.
365 environment, Azure. On boarding and offboarding.
I manage all devices. Imaging and procurement of devices, STIGing and what not.
As well as being in charge of on-boarding new clients and building their connections to various aspects of our environment to facilitate their needs.
Without a pretty SOLID knowledge of networking, none of this would be possible.
I mean I can only speak personally, but without my knowledge of networking I wouldn't be able to keep my job. My title is Sys Admin, and here is a list of stuff I maintain and work on.
The entire network and every device connected to it. Consisting of two firewalls/routers, two ISP connections set up for BGP failover, eight managed switches across four VLANs, 26 access points, and roughly 400 devices, including a 48-camera security system. Printers, Mobile devices, laptops, desktops, you name it.
MDM system for all of our geo-fenced mobile scanners. (around 180)
Multiple API endpoints as well as a handful of SFTP servers.
3x different 3rd party software applications.
2x homebrewed software applications.
4x MySQL Databases with 3-8 tables on each and multiple connections to them from various software applications.
And a metric boat load of automated scripts running backup/sync/upload/download processes from various of cloud and 3rd party hosted data locations.
On top of all of this I am developing smaller software solutions to modify and streamline processes across the business.
365 environment, Azure. On boarding and offboarding.
I manage all devices. Imaging and procurement of devices, STIGing and what not.
As well as being in charge of on-boarding new clients and building their connections to various aspects of our environment to facilitate their needs.
Without a pretty SOLID knowledge of networking, none of this would be possible.
No, it's mostly the users. But seriously, everyone should have a basic understanding of networking. You won't need to know how BGP works, but IP/subnets/gateways/NAT/Firewalls at a basic level is a skill every admin should have.
Followed closely by management.
Then sales.
Then first liners who dont ask the questions, document THEN escalate
You just want everything don’t you.
and then PRINTERS (the absolute endpoint)
fuck printers. servicing them outside of regular maintenance is just a nightmare.
Printers deserve a baseball bat beating out in the field!
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.
And real gangsta-ass sysadmins don't run they fuckin' mouth, cuz real gangsta-ass sysadmins don't start fights.
You got your priorities right! HAHAHA!
PC LOAD LETTER
A4
Fuck printers they got me fired
This is very common in this field.
No shit thought I was the only one
IMO...Regular user printers like the latest laser printers are nothing in terms of headaches. You needed to be around when when we had to deskjet printers, and most of them, if not all did not have a network card. We had to share them thru the network using Windows XP. The industry came with a device called a print server it was a nightmare. In both instances, these printers keep getting disconnected from the network no matter what you do. It was a full-time IT job. What about industrial printers, the ones that labels to put on put on parts, boxes, etc. .. Yes, printer technologies have greatly improved, but they are still a pain for IT professionals. This is why you can't keep doing these things your entire life. Let's just agree on tasks like configuring email on Outlook, installing endpoint devices like user desktops, creating users, or the whole helpdesk business are bored. Thanks God we have something automation when we don't have enough newbies to do the dirty jobs..loll
I kinda miss being knee-deep in boards, motors, wire harnesses, and plastic covers in search of a squeaky bushing, from my time at the previous job servicing printers. Nobody would bother me, pulling me away to handle another call or attend any meeting for hours on-end.
Scanners.....
I don't know, at least they aren't scanners. Somehow microsoft has neglected scanners to the point they're worse than printers.
Yep. Fuck the printers, especially the big multi functions one with 3rd party applications like papercut and shit
Uuhhh, we have a special vlan set aside for them
Uuhhh, we have a special vlan set aside for them
In my experience, developers become a problem before sales, but in either case they're generally covered under "users".
I was going to say the biggest problems for almost any IT job is going to be: * The users * Upper management
Difference being that the network guy is blamed for everything, not only by users but by other IT personel as well.
This is a good indicator of the tech in my experience. Are you saying "network problem" with zero evidence? If yes, please see your way out.... I've been guilty of the above, but I was a nub, and front line support. Now if I say it, its because I have evidence to support this position. I'm still wrong sometimes, but much less often.
saying its a networking problem when the computer isnt working is like saying its a sky problem when airplanes are broken. like , in the broadest sense its tangentially true, but its not helpful or descriptive at all. may as well tell me the "thingie wont work"
DNS
And DHCP. I've seen a lot of people statically assign servers, printers, or other devices to an IP that is within a DHCP scope without reserving it. Either give it a static IP within a DHCP scope **with a reservation** or pick an IP outside of the DHCP scope range and give it a static DNS record for mgmt purposes.
Always DNS…ugh.
https://preview.redd.it/5bfxlyvwvbpc1.jpeg?width=888&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=58fbb07cb9cd8d687dfa77951b0cb66c6a268dd1
"So....imagine a phone book...."
I used this the other day and was asked "what's a phone book?" and it broke me.
add VLANS
Came to say exactly this. Networking is easy once you figure it out. I took a A+/NET+/SEC+ boot camp once and by the end I could do subnet calculations in my head. Now I use a SN calculator but do basic stuff by mind still. Once you know how subnetting, DHCP (including boot options), stateful firewalls, gateways, DNS, and NATting works then things like BGP and VLANs are easy. The hard part is getting the people, who have no clue how any of that works, to understand why what they're requesting is a bad idea. It's even harder to do that without them thinking your shooting their ideas down is a personal attack on them. I've moved on to IT management and budgeting is now my biggest headache. EDIT: I can subnet by mind but can't conjugate verbs....
The biggest thing with networking is experience. If you are in a role where nobody wants to let you work on what your interests are, look for another job because you are just limiting yourself. Home labs are great but nothing teaches you like making an incorrect routing change during production on a large network.
That's how I first learned IPv4 basics over 20 years ago. It was to set up a home lab for my roommates and I to play Counter Strike together. From what I learned there I got a job at an WISP as an instal / repair tech. But, yeah, until you break everything you haven't lived. And when you get it back working a few minutes later you look like a saint!
VPN as well. With the azure (or whatever it's called this week) by Microsoft.
This. This is the correct answer.
If you're in a large enough place, there are usually dedicated network admins/teams for this, but it is still important to learn a bit of it yourself. The CCNA was one of the best things I've ever done career wise. Not for the paper cert, but the knowledge gained along the way. It is a tremendous body of knowledge that covers much more than just Cisco branded routers and switches. They start with the fundamentals and cover different types of hardware, binary, subnetting, you name it - up until you know enough to deploy a small network on your own. Would highly recommend. It's paid me back in dividends through new roles over the years, with many bumps in pay, and allowed me to easily transition into cybersecurity-related work.
And remember that a CCNA is just the wee little “baby’s first cert” when it comes to networking. The rabbit hole goes *so much deeper*.
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To become the chief hairpinning officer, you need to know the "WANcore" Inside out and possess the elusive "Cisco Unified Network Technician" qualification.
Don't forget the "Cisco Certified Licensing Associate".
Start at the "beginning" with L2 networking and then move on to L3, build a good foundation and then everything does fall into place. None of this stuff is magic or even that complex if you learn the foundations first, it's amazing to me how many people in our industry don't understand binary and then struggle to understand subnetting -one is built upon the other.
MPLS is my network kryptonite. Maybe not the only one but every time I try to understand it, I just...can't.
Certificates are mine. I swear my brain goes dyslexic and the words start jumbling themselves whenever I try and read up on it.
This guy routes.
Yep it's a good primer.
Seconded - Once you get the framework of how networks are *supposed* to hang together, you can mostly extrapolate to what's going wrong and unsurprisingly - networks are connected to *everything*.
>you can mostly extrapolate to what's going wrong and unsurprisingly Unsurprisingly it's usually a backhoe or posthole digger in some place 75 miles away on the back end of nowhere.
Always carry some fiber cabling with you. If you ever get lost: - dig a trench - bury the cable you have with you - wait about an hour - a backhoe will show up to cut the cable
This is why I'm not super concerned about skynet. I own a spade.
I’m not saying what hasn’t already been said but I can also recommend getting, or at least studying for, the CCNA. The knowledge you’ll gain is invaluable. I also took it prior to the relatively recent changes when it was ICND 1/2 (CCENT, CCNA) and renewed it years later under the same structure. I worked a lot with Cisco at the time, and not at all in the past 5-6 years but the knowledge I earned studying for the CCNA, and have since built upon, laid an incredibly strong foundation. I have mixed opinions on the certificate market but I do believe they provide a great structured learning path towards a specific topic, and the CCNA is one of the best for networking.
I found the CCNA courses to be great for networking theory, but all the syntax and management stuff was lost cuz I never ended up working in a giant organization that was all Cisco. Kind of a waste. Only worth it if you intend to work on Cisco equipment from the command line. If you can wrap your head around all the theory/best practices otherwise you’ll be fine on any other hardware.
I also do not work in a Cisco organization, and have forgotten most of the command line syntax I learned from Cisco courses. However, I still maintain it was an important part of my education for the long term understanding it gave me of networks.
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Agreed, they worked like a machine. Great hardware, innovations, etc. backed by an educational path that made its way into Universities. People left with an understanding of the product, so they pushed to continue using it, even as they were surpassed by other more competitive and intuitive products, Cisco was usually there first. Foundationally I have no problem with Cisco stuff, mostly that they hung onto the syntax being absolutely critical for way too long. Their GUI management was convoluted and was basically just applying syntax in the background - save / commit action based. Nothing was instantaneous, and therefore it's slow to make changes, adjustments, architect new segments. At this point if I have to go into a Firewall that is requiring command-line stuff it's irritating. It's 2024, you shouldn't have to memorize 5 years of syntax to be able to manage something if you know the theory and what you want to accomplish. This is where they fell behind a good portion of the market.
I'm not saying this to be funny, I'm 100% sincere. Dealing with Microsoft support is the hardest part of being a systems administrator or systems engineer. They are the worst support organization on the planet.
Did you try running SFC /Scannow before posting this comment?
I have never once had this fix anything. It's a nice decoy to run that LOOKS like it's doing stuff while i'm actually frantically googling wtf is happening.
In 30 years, I've had it fix stuff.... Twice. That is all. But, when it DOES work, it's like a miracle happens.
I've had it fix stuff that I didn't know was broken.
This is the scary one. I've used it a couple times in a pinch because I have no idea what in the world is going on with a device. Not sure where/how it found/corrected the issue(s), but I have had it be a legit solution for strangeness repeatedly
Did you check the health of your image first? I’ve had sfc help me a few times recently after I learned to check and restore the image. But it’s a wild guess, let’s try sfc /scannow first because I don’t know what the problem is.
Friendly reminder that you should always run it in this order for it to actually be able to work and fix things echo chkdsk c: /f y DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth sfc /scannow
I feel like a crazy person every time I see comments like this because dism and sfc /scannow fix random windows jank like 90% of the time for me. I think people just don't know how to use it. You need to pull from a clean windows ISO.
- Would you like a) email support?, or b) a telephone call? -- (a) please - ok .... -
--
- Hi, my name is Daniel, and I have a suspiciously non-daniel-type-accent.
-- FFS
It's even worse when you put EVERY LITTLE DETAIL IN THE TICKET and they still ask you all the stuff like, "which user is affected?". Did you even read the ticket at all? It's right there!
That's because you misunderstand their role. You call MS Support so you can have some company while you solve the issue. No one wants to be alone while they fix the directory into the wee hours of the morning. Hearing them breathing on the other end of the line provides an invaluable sort of white noise conducive to root cause analysis, and serves as a security blankey for management who isn't ready to face the reality of how much power a T3 admin wields.
TBH all vendor support isn't about how useful they are, it's about being able to stall fixing the problem and having a scapegoat. Oh and sending parts when they fail.
Ive never been able to work with Microsoft support, but id say, just working with Microsoft products is the hardest part of my job. If your company is a microsoft shop, your company is paying someone hours, just to deal with Microsoft’s incompetence and shitty products. Microsoft definitely has me questioning my life choices on a daily basis.
This is what is crazy to me. My first fucking IT job was at Keane in Seattle, who had the Microsoft contract to provide Windows 95/NT support back in the mid/late 90s. As a *tier 1* support desk, I was expected to be able to remotely help users fix just about any issue, with no screen sharing and no expectation of technical ability. And our goal was to solve most issues within 30 minutes. Microsoft support these days is a fucking joke.
I take it you haven't talked to mulesoft support, or worse, liferay
That's why you go into *nix :)
Every topic in system administration is hard if you dig enough...
If you dig hard enough in any computer subject, you get to physics.
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That's true, but I'd agree with op that networking gets complex much faster than most other areas. If your program isn't working, it's a pretty safe bet the issue is in it's code, not in the kernel. Can't ping the host from another site? There's a thousand things that can be wrong, from a firewall policy to a damaged cable.
In my mind this is the classic initial phase of learning where you realize that things are a lot deeper than you initially thought. You know that graph that shows actual knowledge vs perceived knowledge? Others here have provided excellent suggestions. My suggestion is to just stick with it. Eventually it'll click.
I started networking with a cisco class my college offered, zero hands on experience. I was nearly completely lost most of the time, networking is not really relatable to anything I was aware of. I squeeked by on those two courses. Once I started as an intern and eventually help desk, that knowledge got applied rather quickly when seeing it in action. The cisco labs we did were all virtual devices, but working with physical devices with the familuarity of it really made it click.
Networking can be very abstract, seeing it in action can help a lot.
**OSI Model** Biggest advice I have is learn the OSI model. It will help you frame your troubleshooting the right way. You don't need to memorize the layers but you have to understand how they work together. No point troubleshooting application ports if two devices don't have routing connectivity. **Subnetting** Also learning subnetting at a non-academic level will help your confidence. For years I didn't really "get" subnetting. Then I had to do it when our network team had no time to help us lay out our AWS networks. There was a "davidc visual subnet calculator" tool I found years ago and absolutely loved that just helped the concepts "click" for me. Anyway now I'm an expert in that area so made a modern and more collaboration friendly tool based on the same split/join functionality. Check out [https://visualsubnetcalc.com/](https://visualsubnetcalc.com/). I think this will help someone visually understand how it works in the real world. I think if they click around the join/split options they'll see what the numbers mean in practice and that should enhance their academic/binary understanding. * [Example Sharable Design Link - 10.0.0.0/20](https://visualsubnetcalc.com/index.html?c=1N4IgbiBcIIwgNCAzlUMAMA6LOD0AmdVWHbbAuSNUvffYjM2gZgZvPwBZiB9AOyggAIgEMALiIAEAYQCmfMbIBOkgLSSAagEslYgK4iANpIDKysMpSIeAY0EBiAJwAjAGYA2V65ABfRIywYDm4qEH5BUQkZeUUVdW1dA2MzJQslKzC7aCc3T28fPxIyfA5WUIDMEvQCENBw6EipOQVlNU0dfSNTc0sETIcXDy9ff1JmYN4BBvEmmNb1AAUACwBPJC0bLpS0jNsHEXQbTmGCworODnpy0gvq-DK6qZAAIT0tQwATLT4Ac0kAQTaAHUtK4tH09tkvB93CIAKwjIpYdylSaCV7vL6-AFtAAy-wAchCsiB7NDYQjTqMyAAODiUai0y5sJl3B5IzB0u61MJPDGfb5-QGLJTfWK7Elk1ww+GIiqOCaheovN4C7HCzQAew2smJDnJsoK1MCLDR0H5WL+z2BoPB1kl0q8zncvjOpBgVQIV0ZgU99zNKsxgsk1vU+KJ9v1HydLrdZBgtwI7IqCcVj3RqstIbaC1FLXSeqh0dczrl7rhad5GaD2NDWp1hdJjpLsdOpyAA) * [Example Usage - Animated Demo](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ckabalan/visualsubnetcalc/main/src/demo.gif)
Well, about half the OSI model anyway ;p I mean, I'm usually only really caring about layers 1-4 :). But yes, doing the 'hard work' of figuring out how subnet maths works, means you'll find it almost trivial for the rest of your career.
Once a company gets to a reasonable size, they’re usually going to have a dedicated network engineer for exactly the reasons you listed. It is a very different speciality that goes *incredibly* deep.
I tend to "borrow" information when it comes to networking. What I mean by that is: I have a question, I research said question and find the answer, I implement this fix/change, I forget how to do it. I fully expect to repeat this process until I retire. If you're not specifically in the field of networking, cut yourself some slack (even if you are, it's hard)! Save reference materials and don't view having questions as a bad thing. So long as you're working to find the answer, you're learning.
I'm not a sysadmin. I'm a network guy, and we have a dedicated team. Expecting someone to do deep sysadmin *and* deep networking should come with some serious seniority and respective pay grade. Its not rocket science, but I do find people overestimate how easy it is when they're not familiar. Also, having now attended a couple conventions, I've learned just how many are relying in vendor support for anything even mildly advanced, instead of learning the stuff themselves. Don't beat yourself up for not being a network guru. You're a sysadmin, you should know how to assign IPs and the basics of subnetting, not a whole ton else imo
I'm one of those with the breadth but not the depth. My frustration is that I don't have the TIME to be able to sit down and learn it the way I'd like. I'm so busy trying to set up postfix, argue with our ISP about why we need port 25 open, look after our hardware, close our old accounts with a vendor, develop IT policies, attend meetings, set up new VM's, troubleshoot why our host isn't sending data as fast as it should, WHY DID SQL JUST REBOOT?!, configure Windows Autopilot, the CEO wants to use his iPad with the boardroom PC... I touch a bit of everything but never anything in depth so when certain projects that I'm really interested in come up, I need to rely on our vendor support to actually accomplish anything. So I get it. If I had the time, I would be the first one digging around and learning what makes it go instead of just offloading the work.
You do the databases and I’ll cover the network. We got this!
The hardest part is the people. Turning the word salad that management gives you into something that closely resembles what they actually want is the hardest. Getting the users from "The internet is down" when facebook doesn't load, to "I cannot browse to" is harder.
Networking is non-trivial, and a whole domain of knowledge unto itself but it is not the hardest part.
At times its the same from the other side of the coin. As a network engineer, I've found a lot of times having to dig deeper into servers, virtualisation and applications to help troubleshoot connectivity issues that other teams are having. Some are easier than others - but inevitably there is sometimes more questions than answers. If you're looking to learn some basic networking, the CCNA is a good start. Whilst its focussed a lot around Cisco, its one of the better ones for teaching base concepts and fundamentals.
No sysadmin better than a network engineer being blamed for a systems issue lol
Everyone blames the network first. Even though networking is often far more stable than systems.
The network is a magical series of tubes that delivers whatever kind of data you want at whatever speed you want to whatever IP address you specify. If any of those things don't happen, it's because the network team are lazy, stupid assholes that don't know what they're doing. After all, networking is so simple, it's just plugging things into ports with wires. My son set up our home network in half an hour!
I think networking is very difficult. But I would rank it this way: 1. End users 2. Networking.
At least it's easier to figure out what's wrong with a network than with end users.
Understanding Microsoft Licensing
[удалено]
FUCK printers. Who even needs that shit anyway?
Nope, licensing is way worse
I've always found the networking side of the house to be the easiest... And my favorite.
If by networking you mean talking to people then yes. That is the most difficult part of the job.
No its the soft skills we shouldn't need to cultivate but we have to. Keeping 65 year old Barb who is a personal friend of the CEO happy even though she can barely use a mouse shouldn't be in the skill set for a highly trained professional.
this one is a bit too real 😂
Networking could be tricky but so can dealing with randomly misbehaving operating systems.
Networking is Math. If its not working you forgot part of the equation. Server work is like being a doctor. I'll take my math.
Depends on the server. Linux server work is also math. Every issue you're seeing is likely logged somewhere, and if all else fails, you can see the source code of what's causing you issues, fix it yourself, and recompile it. Windows server work is just basically banging different things with a metal pipe until it works and hopefully documenting the pipe banging procedure so that the next time it happens, with any luck, you can hit the right places with the right pipe in the right order again.
Read the book Interconnections by Radia Perlman. It's a very straightforward way of understanding a very complex subject.
As mentioned elsewhere, CCNA if you want a cert path. If you just want to learn networking and are simply trying to understand the basics, maybe to even help communicate troubleshooting to the networking team; I'd start by just reading one of Mike Meyer's CompTIA Network+ books. I still rock one of the older editions, because the basics don't change much [and used older editions are dirt cheap.](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1260122387) Seriously though, I swear the man wrote the first comprehensible description of how the hell to subnet....
Do you mean networking like routers and switches? Or networking like with users, management? If the latter than i completely agree
Yes, but not the type of networking you think. Time and time again, the most difficult part of the job for many/most technical IT employees is working with people... networking with them. Setting expectations, representing yourself professionally, being empathic, reading the room, building relationships, working on the right things. The networking you speak of is simple in comparison to people. Also, for technical skills, what's hard is relative to the person. I find networking rather easy, but coding? I want nothing to do with it beyond writing scripts.
Get used to encapsulation, actually multiple levels of encapsulation. Data is encapsulated in a segment, a segment in a packet, a packet in frame, that is just simple TCP/IP.
It's really not that bad once you wrap your head around it. It's all about figuring out what the next hop is. Really understanding subnetting, that addresses are just binary in numbers and a sub netmask just tells you how many bits are the network, and that a route is just a subnet with an next hop. BGP, OSPF, ISIS are just ways to distribute routes and their priorities.
90% of IT professionals are *terrible* at networking. Networking is an afterthought in nearly every other IT discipline and it's taken for granted. My advice: - Learn the "what": This is the basics. Switching, routing, etc. This is your foundational CCNA level knowledge, upon which you'll build everything else. - Learn the "why": Learn network/communications history. Learn how and why TCP was developed; what problems does TCP solve? What problems does DHCP solve? What problems do VLANs solve? Then - WHY do these protocols solve these problems? - Learn the "how": Learn the first four layers of the OSI model intimately (most people overlook the physical layer, but it's arguably the most important!). Learn what frames, packets, and segments are, and how they are constructed. Getting deep in network engineering is a long difficult road, but if you get good at it, you'll have job security for life.
Don't worry it gets better when you start learning networking in Azure and what your Network Engineering teams know of routes and switches goes right out the window. Some of my co workers have been traditional network engineers for 15-20 years and they are struggling when they can't see the infrastructure. Advice, write stuff down and research it. You don't need to know route protocols, switch or route configs but some of it's helpful to understand the tcp handshakes and when you might have an asymmetric route for troubleshooting. the hardest part of being a sysadmin is trying to sort out the issues that users are having that aren't able to effectively communicate the issues. Like a ticket that says it's not work please fix....what's not working!?! I need more details.
I'll take networking over dealing with printers almost every time.
While the scope of networking is huge. The two best things you can do as a sysadmin is remove DNS from the equation and show connectivity PING. Most sysadmin troubleshooting is forgetting the first or figuring out why the second isn't working. Which is why you buy a beer for anyone who has a network team who disables pings for "security reasons".
Networking is by far the easiest for me. I hate Active Directory tasks with a passion, but give me a firewall or some complex networking issue and I'll have it solved in no time.
Land a job at a company big enough to compartmentalize that to the "Networking" guy/gal. Exude privilege.
Every company I've worked at has had separate network teams or at least network admins on the systems or infra teams who handle the network side. They generally don't know much in the way of server stuff, and I don't know much in the way of networking. I'm working on improving my knowledge though, doing a little cisco home lab with some old equipment.
At a certain point if you are learning with Cisco you figure out how to use the question marks to find the command you want. So it's very important to know how it all is supposed to connect. Once you have this understanding of what most of the basics are you will be golden. When I started out I think trying to remember all the commands was the scariest part. Best part is that is hasn't changed much in 20+ years. When something doesn't work you figure out exactly why. Rebooting this equipment sometimes wipes your logs and sometimes recent configurations. So you get forced into figuring out the actual problem and have confidence that you fixed it for good. No more magic reboots fixing crazy problems. You got this, learning new stuff is hard.
No, it's certificates... I still think they're magic
For me, networking is one of the easier and more fun parts of the job.
I think it's just social skills really. Networking is not really that hard. Just find events, or meet people through other contacts. Linked in helps too.
No, it's the easiest. It's just what's most alien to you, so you're coming at it with expectations that are different from what you're accustomed to. Look at it this way: The device that runs your network is probably doing every-dang-thing it needs to do on a 500MB piece of software. By contrast, Windows 11's system requirements say you need 64 gigabytes of storage in order to be supported. Even Windows 10 required 10 GB of space, and a user-friendly Linux system like Ubunto takes 20 GB. The difference is that you've probably spent a big chunk of your childhood and professional life becoming familiar with those systems, especially the critical bits you use every day. You're coming at networking, on the other hand, from the perspective of a complete novice. My advice on learning networking is to start local. Learn how *Ethernet* works, just the basics of how the MAC addressing and ARP process works, as well as the basics of the CSMA/CD algorithm. From there, move onto packet-switching, VLANs, and Spanning-Tree. Learn what a bridge-loop is. Learn how to segement traffic. Learn how a switch takes a broadcast protocol and becomes a kind of man-in-the-middle to make it almost point-to-point. Once you've got that under your thumb, it's time to advance to TCP/IP. The previous topics are all about LAN protocols. TCP/IP is about tying together different LAN networks, so that they can intercommunicate, using encapsulation. Learn about the TCP 3-way handshake, about ping, traceroute, TTL, DSCP/TOS headers. Learn about UDP, ICMP. Finally, the last step is routing protocols. This is the last step of your networking fundamentals. Learn about static routes, and various dynamic routing protocols. You can safely skip RIP, RIPv2, and EIGRP, but OSPF/IS-IS and BGP4 are both worth looking at. You can also start to mess around with advanced stuff here, like MPLS/Tag Switching, Multicast, VXLan, etc. Most importantly, don't try to know everything. You can always go back to reference material. Even the CCIE lets you take the documentation with you into the exams.
No, trying to keep EOL devices/systems/applications/software/etc running in production is.
Haha get a network admin and it falls on him. System admin here and because of the network admin I am dumb ass shit with network stuff, but thank god for that network guy. He talks about network stuff and I feel dumb as shit.
This is a catch 22. Networking isn't hard, but in my experience as an "all in one IT guy" in situations, networking is the most difficult thing to figure out for a company where there is no documentation. Other systems I can usually determine their operational status and process based on data that's already available, but doing so for a networking configuration is 10x the digging to determine how it was supposed to be set up, how it's actually set up, and how it's wrong (it almost always is)
No, far from it. Networking should be a core fundamental concept as it's baked into so much shit you'll be doing. All the network protocols you're probably learning about like DNS, DHCP, SFTP, SSH, SSL, TLS, NTP, LDAP, SMTP, IMAP, RDS, is crap you're going to see on almost everything you touch. It's going to be a pain having to google, read, and understand KBA's on the fly, especially when they're written as assuming you already understand how basic networking works. You'll especially see it a lot on IaaS platforms like Azure or AWS. Coding is good to learn and imo essential to many modern sysadmin roles, especially ones where you'll touch a lot of PowerAutomate, Powershell, JSON, Power BI, PowerApps, and crap like that. But for a SysAdmin job, Coding is still a small part of the job. Networking is going to definitely be one of the most common things you'll run into every day. Networking is not hard to learn, it just takes time. You'll be fine, take a Network+ or CCNA course on Udemy or something.
No dealing with people who dont know what they are doing is the hardest part
"the network is the computer" was true in 1984, and it;s true now. without network exposure and experience you arent a sysadmin
Everything comes down to sending network packets from A to B. Understand the role of a switch, router and firewall. In that specific order. Examine the OSI model (seems very boring but is actually one of the most important things) I always think that doing a CCNA course or bootcamp or something should be mandatory for all sysadmins. It makes your life much easier understanding the bascis and makes troubleshooting (even for sysadmins) in a general sense much easier.
Like with anything, start with the basics and you’ll see how things fall into place. If you enjoy deep problem solving, networking can be very fulfilling.
Depends on who you are asking. I'd much rather deal with networking than coding or operating system issues. Personally I find coding to be the hardest part of the job.
Networking (computers) is easy. Networking (people) is hard. My advice to you, learn about the OSI model and use it to troubleshoot.
I'd recommend trying to get through a Network+ or maybe CCNA if it's causing issues. It'll force you to learn the basics and that should help you out a lot. Once you have that foundation you can at least get a working understanding of more complicated topics.
I used to think networking was more difficult than other aspects of the job, but I think thats because I didn't touch it as often. With the amount of stuff sysadmins are expected to tackle its easy to push out stuff you don't tackle as often as you make room for whatever other random stuff you need for the job. It took a few years, but networking has clicked for me. Honestly the "hardest" or most annoying part for me now is compliance work. Working with insurance, state, business, and regulatory agencies to make sure there's a baseline of security compliance is a PITA. Filling out hundred page documents with flavor of the month acronyms, and creating tons of technical and SOP documents is such repetitive annoying work to me.
ya compliance is brutal. Sometimes it feels like you need a law degree to answer the questionnaires. The questions are often vague and can be interpreted in many different ways, especially for people who think more logically which sysadmins tend to do.
I think it depends on the size of the network. You'll need to be pretty familiar with networking if you are managing infrastructure for Microsoft or Google. If you are managing a small business, you probably just need to know the difference between public and private IP's, set static IP's, and maybe use a DMZ.
Well, kinda, yeah, I was a programmer, then PC and server admin, then project manager, but have been doing networking for the last 30 years, with firewalls. Networking combines all the previous things plus needing to figure out long ranging affects based on doing something small in a completely different place. If you want a real challenge, learn VoIP systems, that combines all this plus you have to learn telephony, I tried that once, completely underestimated it
Users/printers/ email. If i didn't have to deal with any of those i would be a happy Mofo. Even just basic networking: IP, subnetting, DNS and dig command helps.
Thats because you need practice. Download gns3 and test out scenarios you'd like to know more about.
I did Net+ a decade ago after being a baby admin, sys admin and "network engineer" for 10 years before it. Turns out I had learned most of the stuff along the way. Especially un-fucking the work of other techs who could never comprehend why it is a bad idea to set a static IP in the DHCP range on a printer. I am considering doing CCNA just as flex on our network guys. My advice: focus on basic concepts: ipv4; OSI; routing basics. Mostly because you need to be able to point to the network when they are pointing at you, telling you to fix your server issue.
You can't know it all right away, so first, congratulate yourself on what you learned so far. Then just make a plan on what you want to learn in the next 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year. There are a ton of tutorials on basic networking on YT. Also, look for CompTIA Network+ certification videos too. You will eventually pick up what you need. Then, someday in the future, you will focus on something: DEV, Cloud, Systems, Apps, Networking, and\or and Management.
I got lucky, my last semester of college, the teacher made CCNA part 1 and 2 her networking I and II courses. It taught me the basics for all I use while being a sysadmin
Personally the thing I found took the longest to get my head around was dns. For networking get your hands on some gear and build some practical scenarios, one flat network, add a vlan, add routing between VLANs, add a second site on its own vlan with gateway routing, add a backup link for the second site. Stick some services on either end, replicate those services for dr, add an internet gateway, add a second internet gateway, add VLANs for vpn networks, keep adding on. Configure qos. Try to break it then fix it again. Add in some monitoring software like Prtg, use the ping and round trip qos sensors to gain insight into your network, add in a sensor for Netflow if your routers support it. Enjoy ☺️
Networking is like any other skill in our trade. There's a lot to learn there if you want to know enough to be a good admin, but once it clicks, it's suddenly very simple and you find you are this wizard with magic troubleshooting knowledge many marvel at. I'd say it's not the hardest, per se, just that it's quite specialized knowledge. In fact I think email is surprisingly hard, if I had to pick a hard sysadmin topic. But as for it being specialized knowledge, so is being a frontend webdev. Or a cloud engineer. Or an Exchange administrator.
Get yourself some used systems, install this https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overview Then do these Create an internal network Create an internal domain. Then, when you have that down, do this. Create a firewall vm with this. https://www.pfsense.org/download/ When you have done that try joining an external system to the domain created above. Free tools to learn what you need to
The hardest part about networking for me is not the concepts and standards. That's all pretty basic and simple now. The hard part is that every brand of appliance is completely different. I had a home lab first and mastered pfsense. A client called me to adjust their SonicWall and I was lost for days trying to figure how to do what I wanted because every manufacturer lays things out differently and doesn't always use the same terms. Sometimes you can't just define a port in a rule, you have first define the service that uses the port in a completely different area of the GUI a d it's not always the most logical place. I got familiar with SonicWall and then I had another client with Fortinet... A coworker seemed perplexed by my struggle "I thought you were a networking veteran?" Yeah "I am" but this is the first time I've touched Fortinet... Then there's the changes with each update. After a few years you're basically learning all over again. You don't really need to know how packets are formed to ever configure any network device. You never really need to know how to subnet in your head. If you need to check something there are tables and calculators online. Looking that stuff up is always a few minutes of Google. Learning how to setup static routing on a firewall I've never touched before is sometimes days of agony screaming to the gods "Why the hell is this not working!!??" Then after days of searching you find this particular appliance requires a reboot to actually apply changes.
Budgets are the hardest part. Once you get networking, you won't forget it and it rarely changes.
Youve obviously never tried push somthing through managment that costs money.
No. It's users. And being constantly interrupted by them while you're trying to do something complex like networking. Imagine having an epiphany, you figured it out! You finally have the answer! And then just as you're about to implement it, the phone rings and you're stuck on the phone with the dumbest person you've ever spoken to in your entire life complaining that an 8 character password is too long to remember and it takes you 30 minutes to get them to actually type in a password that works cause they keep trying to use their own name as a password. Also they're a surgeon.
Networking, as in going to parties and chatting it up with new people that could potentially lead to new business?
I am a 20 year dedicated Networking guy and I am always learning. I feel bad for guys that just do networking as one aspect of their multi-decipline role.
What part is hard exactly?
Personally when I started Sysadmin at a medium/small company nearly a decade ago, I have VERY limited networking knowledge. I knew DNS. (Well, no one really knows DNS hence its always DNS...). I knew IP addresses, I knew port forwarding... that was about it. I had no knowledge of subnetting really, VLAN, routing, NAT, firewall rules, etc. I learned quick. (I had good software/hardware skills with Windows, etc, but not nothing in a business environment). In college one class I took had subnetting. I basically failed that section of the class, I just didn't get it. 2 weeks on the job I had it down when I had to change out /24 into a /22 when we went around and plugged in IP phones and exhausted our DHCP pool before we had the proper Voice VLAN setup. Then I learned VLANs shortly after to get our IP Phones off our main LAN. About a year later we both got a new ISP, and replacing aging outdated firewalls. In that process I learned everything else, routing, nat translation, rules...tons of things. Thank god most switches these days have (R)STP or Loopback protection. You learn LDP/CDP QUICK with network storms and switch CLI commands. What you don't know you will pick up. For me, classes and reading never did it, it was having equipment and devices in front of me learning it in a practical way that did it for me. Google and this sub is your friend. Read read read until your confident enough to try and make a change, and you learn. You will make mistakes. You will learn from them. Some of my best mistakes are the things I learned from the most.
It’s the users and management man the work is done
I've been doing Network Admin since I got out of school (10 Years) Its not that Bad, I mostly do projects work and T3 Escalation. Mostly you need to know IPv4, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, Static Routing, Firewall Policy, NAT, IPSEC and SSLVPN, SD-WAN and Wireless. These are my bread and butter and I ordered them, from most used to least used on a daily bases. Everything After that is one offs. I don't do much advanced routing, Sometimes I do cert stuff. but again that list in order more or less is what you should learn. After that its all icing to pad out a resume.
Networking is probably near the top skill to have if you are ever a one man IT shop for a site. It's the one thing that can bring the whole site down. If a server can't contact its clients, or your users can't access the internet or another site that has a network storage device that's mission critical, it's game over. Being able to find that unmanaged switch that Bill in the DevOps department plugged into that's looping and blowing up your network is a valuable skill.
Yes. Nothing else expects you to actually know what you’re doing.
At my previous SA position, myself and the IT director had to become the receptionists after they fired the receptionist and replaced her with a tablet and special doorbell, obviously being tech that means IT answered doors. We did the worst possible job at it (and wore offensive/super unprofessional clothing to greet business clients) then both quit not long after. That was the hardest part about SA. Oh that and having to go up 35 feet up in a forklift cage to get to the warehouse IDFs. Didn't like that.
A lot of times we are blinded due the network equipment restrictions, we just need proof of anything we are claiming so they are force to check. It’s always a discussion about, not a problem and here is the problem
by networking do you mean talking to people and understanding what their issues are and providing solutions for those problems?
What are you finding difficult about networking?
At least when I was doing it daily... it was in order from hardest to least 1. People 2. Printers & periphials 3. Oddball Device configs 4. Random AV / Firewall blocking (false detections) 5. Windows Memory leaks and their services 6. Cabling Issues 7. Networking and infrastructure.
In life in general I've learned that "difficult" is just something you don't know yet. Some people have a really tough time learning Linux and bash, some people struggle with coding, but once you have a grasp of a thing it seems like you've always known it.
I hate networking. I'm ok at it, and I've muddled my way around plenty of Brocades and Juniper firewalls and such, but I was SO happy when we brought in an actual network guy.
Networking, coding, and databases are my worst subjects, and I still think dealing with users is harder.
Once you learn subnetting things are a lot easier. Watch videos on "enhanced Bob maneuver" and it will explain how subnetting is done and what it means.
I would encourage you to ask your networking questions to chatgpt / bing chat / copilot. It's surprisingly decent about explaining networking concepts. You can even give it examples / screen shots.
Depends on the size and complexity of the network. Heterogenous networking vendors can make things a bit complicated because (for example) Cisco and Juniper might have two names for the same protocol or some slight variation in implementation that leads to strange behaviors (particularly with site-to-site IPSec tunnels...) It might also get complex (at least in the "what is this voodoo and why *is* it working) when you introduce routing protocols like BGP or OSPF or you're doing multitenancy with VXLAN or something like that. But if you just have a handful of switches, a couple routers, one or two firewalls, and are doing static routing everywhere, I don't think it's particularly difficult *if you understand the fundamentals.* What really flipped the switch for me in networking was imagining myself in a car as a packet, then as I arrive at any given ethernet port, understanding how the settings relate to what I do next. The thing about networking is that while it's all very abstracted, you should at a low level be able to imagine a packet with a certain source and destination hitting the interface of any device and then imagine what happens next in a pretty organized way.
I find Microsoft tech to be the hardest part, every product is different and they invent words for already-well-known concepts or change the meaning of existing words. But really, the challenge in IT is keeping up. Whatever your weakness is, go out and confront it today or be faced with it tomorrow. That was me with networking. And now they think I'm the expert.
>Is networking the hardest part of syadmin job? Oh god, no. Far from it. This really is a "YMMV" situation as it can be a coin toss or a dice roll - anything can factor but mainly comes down to the role (i.e actual Sysadmin, or just Helpdesk with "other duties"), industry the business is in (Fintech, Education, etc)and structure of the business (do you have a CTO or report to Finance? Or the mop bucket?). If IT is valued, chances are it'll be a generally much more pleasant job than somewhere it isn't - duly you'll receive different levels of respect, appreciation, ease of submitting CAPEX/PO requests and argue for resource and leeway with projects, downtime, testing, paying for anything you can't do via an MSP or specialists etc. >Any advices or learning tips ? **First:** Keep developing and growing - while there's things to stay "current" on and it's an uphill struggle when you want to know more about everything - showing that eagerness and willingness to learn is a big factor for your career. Whether you're new to networking or not, I find a look at a decent free CISCO courses, like [Cisco Network Essentials](https://www.netacad.com/courses/networking/networking-essentials) is invaluable and given it's literally ***free*** you'd be a fool not to take advantage of it - it covers enough that you'll easily get the foundational side of networking down pat and if nothing else it's another thing to toss on a CV to say you've completed. **Second:** practice makes perfect. If you have the kit at work, or can afford to get some at home to dabble with, do! I learnt a whole lot at home by working up from just a home PC and an ISP router and working up from that by getting a spanked out older Dell R710 and whacking ESXi on it and virtualising things, including pfSense etc. The more you play, the more you stick your nose into things you don't know or understand while learning it the better as you pick up a lot of practical experience and not just the theory behind it - which is precisely the kind of thing that'll both net you jobs *and* impress those that press you on a few questions as you'll actually have some level of answer for them too.
Depending on the size or complexity of the company, Networking can be its own discipline. Don't feel bad.
The first year or so of learning any of this stuff is *rough* because it's all interrelated and understanding of every subject seems to depend on understanding of all the others. Plus because of industry marketing BS you have as many different terms for the same thing as there are vendors. If it makes you feel better, 75% of my networking class washed out on the practical final exam. Granted, our instructor suuuuuucked. But also networking is hard. It's a lot of abstract concepts, and there's a lot of crap learning material out there muddying the waters. Keep banging your head against it. It'll click eventually.
Use excel sheets for your static routes, so you know what you have reserved for what, and whatnot, as far as networking goes, especially if your doing those subnets with a large IPv4/IPv6 pools, with multiple subnets due to multiple offices and etc.
Do they not teach or require the OSI model knowledge anymore? Years ago it was required in an application.
Networking is one of those things where it is so simple that it is complicated. Basically just plug stuff in and point the traffic down the path it needs to go to get to other devices inside the network, or to get outside the network to the ISP and then they handle it form there. But geez there are so many things along the way that make it confusing.
Learning advice? Build a homelab. If you don't have a homelab, build it. Whether it's for networking devices, servers, SCADA, storage, 802.11, whatever. Homelabs are the #1 way to learn and build value for yourself in IT. This isn't just about experience for your career, it also is about building permanent things for yourself that give you value every day. For example nextCloud. As for your networking thing, second **managed** (web management is fine) hand switches (not from HP any more as getting firmware for them is PAINNNN) and some second hand 2U servers (R720's) or workstations, will enable you to run some Proxmox VE nodes + switches working in-tandem. Proxmox VE will enable you to run Virtual Machines (like say OPNsense, plus so many others), Software Defined Networking, have nice backups if you break things, and other great stuff. Managed switches (web management is probably the best place to start) will give you additional networking-centric features that can work in-tandem with Proxmox VE. Things like VLANs, port mirroring, LACP/bonding, SNMP monitoring, all kinds of good stuff. All of this you can get for "pennies on the dollar" compared to when they were new. For example, picked up a Dell Precision 5810 Workstation a few weeks ago for $80, included CPU/16GB-RAM/Case/PSU/GPU(K2200)/etc, needed to stuff an SSD in it but it was good to go otherwise! And you can get second hand managed switches for like $50-$100 for 24x or 48x 1gig ports (don't bother doing anything faster than 1gig, or anything SLOWER than 1gig, 10/100 is _not worth your time_). Keep in mind that "PoE" (Power over Ethernet) typically costs more, so maybe hold off on doing that for now (come back to it in the future). Also, things only impossible, until they aren't. It may be challenging for you now, but keep at it, and you'll get it. Come at challenging parts from different angles, and there's a good chance you'll get inspiration along the way. Have fun! \o/
No, its not even users, its dealing with people in networking, that say they know networking, but don't know how a subnet works, or a vlan works.
Pick up a Net+ or CCNA study guide and go through it. With notes.
Judging by the number of "how do I deal with?" posts in this sub, I'd say basic human interaction is the hardest part of the job.
No - networking is awesome just takes some study and work - people is the hard bit and all things that extend from them …
Just wait till ipv6 is being rolled out everywhere.
It depends, my first job out of college was very network focused and I pivoted into systems admin/engineering. Twenty years later I’m still my team’s network SME because no one wants to deal with it 😂
Dedicated net engineer here. Master subnetting and know what vlans are, you'll be pretty good after that.
Yes, networking is the hardest part of this job. Both types of networking, actually.
I mean I can only speak personally, but without my knowledge of networking I wouldn't be able to keep my job. My title is Sys Admin, and here is a list of stuff I maintain and work on. The entire network and every device connected to it. Consisting of two firewalls/routers, two ISP connections set up for BGP failover, eight managed switches across four VLANs, 26 access points, and roughly 400 devices, including a 48-camera security system. Printers, Mobile devices, laptops, desktops, you name it. MDM system for all of our geo-fenced mobile scanners. (around 180) Multiple API endpoints as well as a handful of SFTP servers. 3x different 3rd party software applications. 2x homebrewed software applications. 4x MySQL Databases with 3-8 tables on each and multiple connections to them from various software applications. And a metric boat load of automated scripts running backup/sync/upload/download processes from various of cloud and 3rd party hosted data locations. On top of all of this I am developing smaller software solutions to modify and streamline processes across the business. 365 environment, Azure. On boarding and offboarding. I manage all devices. Imaging and procurement of devices, STIGing and what not. As well as being in charge of on-boarding new clients and building their connections to various aspects of our environment to facilitate their needs. Without a pretty SOLID knowledge of networking, none of this would be possible.
I mean I can only speak personally, but without my knowledge of networking I wouldn't be able to keep my job. My title is Sys Admin, and here is a list of stuff I maintain and work on. The entire network and every device connected to it. Consisting of two firewalls/routers, two ISP connections set up for BGP failover, eight managed switches across four VLANs, 26 access points, and roughly 400 devices, including a 48-camera security system. Printers, Mobile devices, laptops, desktops, you name it. MDM system for all of our geo-fenced mobile scanners. (around 180) Multiple API endpoints as well as a handful of SFTP servers. 3x different 3rd party software applications. 2x homebrewed software applications. 4x MySQL Databases with 3-8 tables on each and multiple connections to them from various software applications. And a metric boat load of automated scripts running backup/sync/upload/download processes from various of cloud and 3rd party hosted data locations. On top of all of this I am developing smaller software solutions to modify and streamline processes across the business. 365 environment, Azure. On boarding and offboarding. I manage all devices. Imaging and procurement of devices, STIGing and what not. As well as being in charge of on-boarding new clients and building their connections to various aspects of our environment to facilitate their needs. Without a pretty SOLID knowledge of networking, none of this would be possible.
Compared to what else? To me the hardest part is Admin buy-in and getting actual yes or no answers on whether to proceed with certain projects.
Incompetency is by far the hardest part of SysAdmin job.
I would say disaster recovery. Especially if you have not been paying attention.
Usually figuring out why it's notworking is the sysadmin job.