Education wiki

A doorway into technical agency#

This wiki is for curious adults who use technology every day but want to understand, operate, troubleshoot, and eventually build more of it themselves. It begins with the systems and networking foundations I am studying for an early career in Linux systems administration and network operations.

The goal is not to make every reader a specialist. It is to provide enough context to see the larger technical landscape, understand ordinary documentation, and choose a useful next direction.

Understand → Practice → Evidence#

Topics are developed as flexible learning clusters:

Understand — connect a concept to the larger system and explain it in ordinary language before moving toward protocols and technical specifications.
Practice — use an accessible lab to observe, configure, break, or troubleshoot the concept. Most suggested labs should work on an ordinary computer with free and open-source software.
Evidence — connect the subject to completed, documented work where I have personally applied it.

Not every topic needs all three parts. A foundational page may stand alone; an applied claim should be supported by work I performed and can explain.

Practice what is here#

Reading is half of it. Two surfaces work directly off these pages:

Glossary — every term and command defined here, each linked back to the section that explains it properly.
Study — practice questions and command scenarios. Every answer carries an explanation of why the other options are wrong, and a link to the page it came from.

Networking foundations#

OSI model — a seven-layer reference model for connecting protocols, devices, encapsulation, and troubleshooting to the larger communication system.
Network topologies — how nodes and links are arranged, from mesh and star to spine-and-leaf and tiered enterprise designs.
Transmission media — the radio, copper, and fiber that carry data, what bounds each one, and who standardizes what.
Wireless media — taking turns on a shared channel, the 802.11 generations and their bands, cellular, and satellite.
Wired media — copper categories, the 802.3 standards, single-mode and multimode fiber, coax, and plenum ratings.
Transceivers and connectors — pluggable modules, their form factors, and the connectors that terminate copper and fiber.
Network appliances — the physical and virtual systems that forward, filter, distribute, store, and expose network traffic.
Network applications — beginning with content delivery networks and the relationship between distributed infrastructure and applications.
Network functions — VPNs, tunneling, IPsec, quality of service, and the lifetime of routed packets.
Network protocols and ports — common application protocols, the port ranges IANA allocates, and the network-layer protocols that carry them.
Network traffic types — unicast, multicast, anycast, and broadcast delivery patterns.
IPv4 addressing — binary octets, public and private ranges, subnet masks, CIDR, and variable length subnet masking.
Subnetting, CIDR, and VLSM — counting hosts and networks, the mask as a bitwise test, prefix notation, and sizing subnets to fit.
IPv6 addressing — hextets and zero compression, the address types on a working interface, neighbor discovery, and coexistence with IPv4.
Cloud computing concepts — NFV, virtual private clouds, cloud traffic controls, and deployment and service models.
Software-defined networking — separating the control and data planes, SD-WAN, VXLAN overlays, and infrastructure as code.
Zero-trust architecture — verifying every request rather than trusting a location, the NIST policy model, and SASE.

Linux foundations#

Linux abstraction layers — hardware, kernel, and user space, and what the kernel does at the boundary between them.
The Linux filesystem hierarchy — one tree from a single root, what each top-level directory holds, and how root access is meant to be used.
The shell and the command line — reading a command, dot files, shell versus environment variables, PATH, and the manual pages already on the machine.
Streams, redirection, and pipes — the three streams every process gets, how the shell repoints them, and the 2>&1 ordering trap.
File permissions and links — the user/group/other model, chmod in both notations, umask defaults, and symbolic links.
Archives and compression — why tar and gzip are separate tools, and what metadata an archive preserves that cp does not.

This wiki expands with finished notes and completed labs reviewed as standalone lessons.

Authorship and scope#

The educational substance begins in notes I typed while studying or in labs I performed and documented. AI may help interview me, organize the material, correct presentation, and fit it into the site, but it is not used to manufacture unlearned expertise or unperformed evidence.

The material is FOSS-first because free tools and owned systems make practice more accessible. Proprietary workplace systems will still be addressed where reality requires them, with a clear distinction between transferable concepts, documentation- based comparisons, and systems I have personally operated.