Learning Networking

Networking is the plumbing everyone depends on and few people want to debug at 1 AM. I already got a forced lesson migrating the homelab to Layer 3 (L3) routing (Frankenstein lab post). This track is about keeping that pain useful.

Initial Learning Objectives

• Follow a packet: IP → route → DNS name → service. Know where to look when each step lies.
• Isolation that works: VLANs and firewall rules as policy, not magic labels on a diagram.
• Capture when stuck: tcpdump or Wireshark for “is traffic leaving, arriving, or getting dropped?”
• Platform tie-ins: load balancers, ingress, and Edge Observability make more sense when L3/L4 behavior is intuitive

Skip for now: carrier BGP deep dives, hardware cert trivia, memorizing every RFC.

How I plan to learn

Keep running the homelab as the lab. Break routing on purpose, fix it, write down what fooled me.