[I hope this belongs here - if not, lmk and I’ll delete the post. I’ve been mainly lurking here so far]
In a month I’ll be in charge of “IT-stuff” in a small office. People are generally happy if there is internet and VoIP is working. I’d like to take the opportunity to learn what I can, while I have the chance. And maybe/hopefully contribute to make it a bit better. For now I want to look into how I should configure wifi and access for office/guests (and devices that are used obv.) Thing is, I don’t know where to start and what I actually can do. Do I just google “how to configure wifi in the office?” and go from there? (I’m a bit hesitant to do that since I’ll not be able to tell if what I find is good) Is there any good reference material you would suggest? Any suggestions are appreciated.
I studied business informatics (but it’s been a while) so I’m not completely clueless (but still clueless hehe).
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I would start with getting a good idea of how things actually work, like the TCP stack, DHCP, Wifi, etc. Learning these basics will help a lot in diagnosing issues, because you’ll be able to isolate it to specific parts of the network to look at. Having a good grasp of the basic principles of networking has really helped me a lot in figuring out issues.
A lot of the other stuff - like “how do I configure wifi in the office” - is highly vendor-dependent. The process for, say, setting up a guest network is going to be different depending on what hardware you have. But if you have a good grasp of the basics of networking you’ll be able to figure out what those settings actually do.
Sadly, I learned a lot of this stuff through trial and error and long frustrating attempts at getting wifi and routing and VPNs to actually work, so I don’t have any materials to recommend.
Edit: Another tip is to be able to build models of the systems you’re making so you can test changes. It’s incredibly helpful to have an environment you can break and rebuild quickly to test things. This goes for basically everything sysadmin related.
Thanks for the material! I’ll check it out. Not supporting https was a bit eyebrow-raising at first hehe.
It makes sense to me; educational material should be accessible as far and wide as possible
Get yourself a copy of TCP/IP Illustrated. It’s old, but it’s still relevant. The basic protocols haven’t changed that much.
I’ll look into that, ty!
Use available tools, what concepts are you stuck on?
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/osi-model-networking-layers-explained-in-plain-english/
Nothing yet, I was a bit lost on where to start. People here were kind enough to give me a few good starting points, so I think I’ll go from there. Thanks for linking the explanation of the OSI-model! I remember that from uni, not much of the actual content though. From what I heard in this thread is seems like a good place to go from.
