learning by doing

[bdunn]

The first time I set up a network it was by the book. The IEEE office at school orderd the stuff to set up a small ntwork and it arrived and sat in boxes for abotu a month becaust nobody wanted t otake the time to set it up. At the time it was state of the art for small networks, Novell v2.05 over ARCNET. I unboxed the manuals and took them and came back and set it up the next day.

I hadn't given much thought to that network till recently when a small businessman called me for a consulting job. He heard that I'm good with networks and nobody wanted to touch his old network. Turned out to be Novell 2.5 over ARCNET. He wanted to upgrade, without losing his data, and was unable to. He had to ditch the 386's in favour of k6-3s but he is now running 100MB ethernet WIN NT. It took about 25 hours of odd hour work over the course of a month but he's running and timekeeping and bookeeping apps are y2k ready.

I enjoy takign on jobs that others cringe at sometimes but thats just because I have experience with a wide array of things and can always learn something new.

I picked up the MCSE study guide and looks to me liek the networkign essentials may be the hardes of the exams because there are soo many names.

[rusabus]

I basically learned everything I know by doing the jobs others cringed at. When I wanted to build my first network, I did a bit of research and then started spending some money. $50 later I had a 10base2 Coax network up and running between 3 PC's. $100 later and I have the same 2 PC's running 10/100 Ethernet with CAT 5 cables. I had some big obstacles -- things I had never attempted before -- but learned how to overcome them by overcomeing them. Now I can setup almost any size network for almost any type of client demand and OS requirements.

I agree about the networking certification part of almost any exam. There are too many names.