Project Ideas

Wireshark

Project Ideas

Network packets. They’re like magic. And I want to learn all the spells.

I remember this one day at the tech support job that helped put me through college (we’re talking 2000-ish, so tech was a little different back then…), a co-worker and I were trying to figure out a communication issue with a particular PCI card. We set up two of these PCI cards to communicate with each other through TCP/IP. I loved orchestrating the communication process from the back end and watching it succeed!

As I’ve been studying for Network+ exam and learning about network communication and IP packets, I installed Wireshark on my computer and captured a set of packets to look at. It’s crazy how much information is there and I want to learn how to decode and make sense of all of it!

Some resources I plan to use through the process:

  • Lynda.com courses (library access is the best!): Wireshark Essential Training, Wireshark Network Troubleshooting, Wireshark Advanced Tools and Techniques
  • Wireshark User’s Guide

I’ll let you know how it goes!

In the Cloud

Learning Path, Project Ideas

I’m fascinated by the idea of Virtual Machines in the cloud.

Amazon Web Services has a free training course for their entry level cert, so that’s on my list for sure! I’ve gone through the first module already and have played around with an EC2 instance (linux!) and it’s pretty cool. But there’s so much I don’t know about how it works and all the things you can do with it!