In two months i'll be starting college in Networking & Support looking to get a head start on the basics. If you have any knowledge/advice i'd love to hear it. i know a very basic understanding.
i like to be prepared :P
-Dan
Really spend some time getting into subnetting, how to do it on paper, in your head, standing on your head so forth. Grab a decent cisco book or ccna cert for dummies (excellent for the exams).
Grab packet tracer and build virtual networks and youtube the shit out of whatever topic you are learning.
Grab packet tracer and build virtual networks and youtube the shit out of whatever topic you are learning.
^^^^Awesome advice right there.
Learn the layers of the OSI and TCP/IP models ( http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IJxULM6OoA4/SjffNhGGzXI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/TFKJcGcBfnQ/s320/300px-G0209_TCPIP_vs_OSI.jpg ) that picture should help you.
Awesome piece of software, also grab yourself wireshark ( http://www.wireshark.org/ ) and use it to see how items are moving.Then associate the events to the layers they are occuring. I would also recomend learning the "handshakes" (network guys are damn formal) that are involved.
Look into Net+ and Security+ certs and for Cisco stuff, often times, the (if you are in the US) local community college will have a better program regarding Cisco than a major university.
The bit about the community college stuff is true, you pay pennies on the dollar for community college courses and the Cisco courses are generally run through the Cisco Networking Academey, which makes them the same as a university's course. Unfortunately, that also means that the course is 100% Cisco and they don't really get into other vendors networks.
If you are lucky, like I was, you can actually work on real hardware for labs. Not every college can afford several racks of routers and switches for students to play with.
Network classes, subnets, NAT, VLAN's, TCP V4 & 6 basics
"Grab packet tracer and build virtual networks and youtube the shit out of whatever topic you are learning." What do you mean by that?
Thanks for all the advice and i have been looking into Subnets and looking around making sure i have it.
http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/netacad/course_catalog/PacketTracer.html
Link to Cisco Packet Tracer
I'll be able to help you out on some of that stuff. I do have some experiance in the networking sector.
I did cisco network academy for my boces class. It was pretty good. We did work with all cisco products, but the commands are generally the same in most cases with many vendors
Goodluck in your studying i am not into networking stuff but in Finland i use to do IT works and support at http://www.mpy.fi/ and i learn a lot from it.One of my advice is to make serious of everything so you will be professional soon.That's is all i can say just study hard and hope you will learn a lot and create your own strategy soon.