I am starting a networking blog.  I figure my first entry will be answering one of the questions I hear the most: “How do I start?”.

For lessons I would look over at NetworKing’s Youtube channel.  He has some pretty good (and free) videos to get you started on what networking is and some of the basic technologies/ideas behind it.  If you want to get a certification I would look at INE.com, they have the materials to get your CCNA for ~$120.  The CBTNuggets.com  teacher Jeremy Cioara is great to listen to and will get you interested in the material, but CBTNuggets is more expensive, and he doesn’t go into enough depth to get your certifications sadly, I do thank Jeremy though as I don’t think I would have gotten very far in this carrier without his enthusiasm.

Get Gear free/cheap:
To get virtual routers I would head over to GNS3.  You have to supply your own OSs for the routers but they are around online, or you can buy a Cisco 3745 online at eBay for ~$20 and pull the IOS from there (I suggest finding one online though).  I would suggest just doing GNS3 for a while and see if you are interested in routing once you start actually just doing it, if you are not you haven’t spent anything. Sadly GNS3 doesn’t do switches, so I would suggest buying some 3550s from ebay.  You can attach your physical switches to the virtual routers and have them work just fine.  Just a warning: Ebay has people who sell pre-built labs, these are pretty much always a rip off as they have the cheapest of the cheap gear and often come with either pirated software and more often software that is free if you just search for it.

Get Gear less cheap:
If you have money to spend I would suggest getting CML for ~$200 per year.  This will give you switches/routers/other to play with and will work for pretty much anything you want to do.  This is what I plan to do once I have time to get back into working with a network lab.

What is networking?
One thing I have never seen is a good description of what routing is, and what routers/switches do for new people.  Networking is moving data around between computers, the computer takes the data it wants to move and breaks it down into little chunks called Frames (also often called packets, but a packet is slightly different).  These packets have the data in them as well as a few tags to tell the network where to send the Frame.  Networking is made up of 2 main technologies (you’ll find there are WAY more but just 2 for now): Ethernet and IP.  The Frames have a set of tags for each of these,  Ethernet uses MAC addresses to find where the Frame is from and where it is going; this is what switches look at.  IP uses IP addresses to find where the Frame is from and where it is going; this is what routers look at.

This is a what a Frame looks like, they can be seen using a packet capture tool, such as Wireshark.