Hello Mates,
Well this is for the first time I am trying my hands on blogging, the irony is that I am married now and I shouldn’t be doing this ;)
I have been part of network and telecommunication industry for a long time and I must admit that the strategy which was adopted to teach us the fundamentals of networking and telecom wasn’t at par and I struggled a lot to understand the basics of the work I did for a long time (it was the time when I was working at Level two of the network technology ;) )
Usually, network engineers do all that usual technical stuff without a clue of stuff happening at the background ( to be precise I would say , layer three and layer two of OSI) and hence the work appears to be a monotonous stuff rather than an interesting affair with the packets. Well, I conducted a survey ( a pretty long one, six years) and tried to understand the logic and modus operandi of so called successful network and telecom engineers, to my surprise it was all either mugged up stuff, some chaotic chunks of information ( with bad checksum :D ) from huge number of books on TCP/IP and the inheritance of some senior engineer and colleagues.
…. and this was the time when I started thinking of rising above the vendor specific technology; my journey started with the RFCs and there interpretations in form of thousands of books on TCP/IP… kaboom…. The interpretation was wrong (and unexpected)… so here is Mayank Nauni… a confused engineer, wondering what to follow and what not to….
So the confused Mayank started exploring these things on his own… and here comes the superhero of my story… Varun Khanna, my colleague and an exceptionally talented visionary… I have learnt a very helpful learning aid from him… if you want explore the packet flow, convert the packet into a car (preferably a Ferrari) and get into the car (and study the flow / path).
Packet Analyzers are the tool that a network engineer gets to use at later stages of his career (on an average three to four years after working as a Level 1 network engineer). My methodology will stress on the usage of packet analyzer tools to study the working mechanism of network protocols. The protocols are designed so beautifully and so self-explanatory that with the help of packet analyzer and the concerned RFC we do not require going through plenty of books explaining the same mechanism in different mannerism.
At times we discover plenty of interesting facts about the existing protocols and we have named them as “technical orgasms” … yes it gives me immense pleasure :D to discover something that lies there but was unexplored ( at least by me)…. We feel like Christopher Columbus at times
“Keep it Simple Baby”… will be my fundamental behind these upcoming tutorials from our end.
Looking forward for your additions on the same as it is a high time we should change the conventional methodology of network study. Intelligent Network needs Intelligent Engineers.
