[Announce]Beginners Networking Course

[Hamster]

Hi Everyone,

I sent out some feelers a while ago to see if there were people interested in
participating in a networking course aimed at complete beginners.

Response was encouraging, so I'd like to announce the commencement of this
course.

I'm not sure how frequently lessons will be sent out. The first lesson will be
sent out early next week. I intend to play it a bit by ear - if its all quiet
after I send a lesson out, then I'll send the next lesson out fairly soon after
in the assumption that there were no problems with the previous. If one lesson
generates a lot of discussion then I will hold off on the next lesson until all
the issues are cleared up.

The rest of this email does two things:

1. Explains how to participate.
2. Provides a rough course outline.


Hamster


### How to Participate ###

You will need to sign up to the courses mailing list. Sign up here: 

http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/courses


At any given moment, there are several different courses active on this
list. The default list behaviour is to send everyone email from all the
courses. Should you wish to restrict it so that you only receive email relevant
to the course you are interested in, this is possible too. In order to activate
this feature, you will need to modify your subscription details. This
is achieved by going here:

http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/courses

and right down the bottom of the screen you will see the option to "change your
subscription options". Follow the instructions and you will see a grey table
full of different settings you can modify. Find the one called "Which topic
categories" and select the topics you're interested in. This networking course
is (at time of writing) the bottom choice. Then simply click the "Submit
Changes" button at the bottom of the screen and you'll only receive emails on
the course you're interested in.

Making sure this feature works correctly does however require a tiny bit of
discipline - please make sure that all correspondence about the networking
course contains the text "[Networking]" somewhere in the subject line.


### Course Outline ###

This is a rough outline for the course. If you want something changed, you have
to let me know.

BASIC NETWORKING COURSE

Aim: To introduce people with NO PRIOR networking experience to basic
networking hardware, setup, terms and concepts.

Goal: To set up a simple home network of two or more computers, that share a
single connection to the internet.

Prereqs: Only a willingness to have a go at trying something new and to not be
afraid to ask questions.

Notes: Will not be covering wireless networks or VPN.


Basic Course Outline:

1. Intro

	Welcome to the course.

	Why we're using the command line.
	How to use the command line.

	Diagram of the network we'll be building.


2. Hardware

	What nics, hubs, cables, switches and routers are.
	Installing a nic.

	A look at historical networking hardware.


3. Packets, Ports and Protocols

	Introducing networking terms and concepts.


4. Putting into Practise

	This lesson will actually get our networked computers talking to 
	each other.
	Troubleshooting.


5. Taking it further

	Now you've got a network up and running, this will look at what you can
	do with it, including:

	NAT / IP Masq (internet connection sharing)
	Samba
	NFS