Intro - Road to CCNA
I still remember when I was the designated Minecraft server sysadmin in my high school friend group. Barely knowing enough to get started, I installed VirtualBox, spun up a CentOS virtual machine, and somehow managed to configure port forwarding on my router. Even though I didn’t know enough to appreciate it at the time, my ISP was nice enough to provision a publicly routable IPv4 address to my home router (as opposed to putting my router behind carrier grade NAT). And just like that, my friends were able to connect to my server. One by one, they started to pop up in the blocky world of Minecraft. At this point, most people would declare their association with computer networking over. But for me, my obsession with computer networking had only just begun. I was fascinated and confused by the many little details that enable computer networks to work.
Anyways, fast forward a few years, and after many hours of reading Wikipedia articles, watching YouTube videos, talking to experienced sysadmins and engineers, and studying computer science at university, I now have a more complete understanding of computer networks.
But I feel like my knowledge ought to be formalized and expanded. In particular, my understanding of some protocols such as STP and BGP is very limited. I want to improve that. I also want to improve my ability to use Cisco specific tools. So, I've decided to study for the Cisco Certified Network Associate certification. I'll document my learning journey on here, so stay tuned.