exerauflyboy5

Does anyone have any info on how to get a good start into networking maybe even becoming a network engineer and getting Cisco certification? My idea is to do this on the side in my off time.

Ex

fatmike69

Wouldn't recommend this route anymore, the days of the IT professional are numbered. Read the book "Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google" if you want a glimpse on what the future holds. In-house networks, storage, and computing will soon become a utility for purchase, just like electricity. Companies simply won't need to have their own infrastructure anymore, when they can just cheaply buy computing power as a service. This is what happened during the industrial revolution with electricity, and it is happening with computing now. Google has their business model deep into this "cloud-computing" technology, and they will make it happen.

To answer your original question though, there are plenty of books and online courses to pursue these routes. I hold my Novell CNA&CNE (now pretty much defunct), Microsoft MCSE, and a Cisco CCNA, which I took courses for mostly at night thru the local colleges. I did the Cisco CCNA on home study, Cisco publishes their own training books available online or at most bookstores. I will say this, without a lab to work on the equipment while you train, the certificate you get will be pretty much in just theory, and for the most part worthless.

rickair7777

Cloud computing may well be the wave off the future, but it's not going to happen overnight.

Cloud computing might be cheap for the home user, but the security, reliability, and redundancy required for a medium+ size company is not going to come cheap. They will need DEDICATED bandwidth, not shared with everyone in your neighborhood.

Also many companies like doing things THEIR way, not just using a somebody else's idea of generic jack-of-all, master-of-none applications. You can have a custom app on a remote system of course, but you probably still need your own people to manage it.

I worked for a large fortune 500 and we looked into SAP...we spent a year doing business analysis so SAP could work up a price. They quoted us about one BILLION dollars...we passed on that, much as executives liked the idea of outsourcing, our in-house readily customize-able system didn't cost anywhere near that much to maintain.

SAP got greedy IMO...they based their price on a pie-in-the-sky estimate of efficiency gains across the organization which which MIGHT have been achieved with their product. If all the gains did't come through, the company would have been in the red for years.

As fas as networking, there will still be jobs but they will pushed to the extreme ends of the spectrum...you will either be one of a few high-end engineers working for the cloud providers (the cloud doesn't eliminate network requirements, it just moves them around) or a low-end onsite employee who manages LAN wireless nodes...basically a PC technician. The high-end guys will have a MS-EE or equivalent education.

I don't think the internet will replace corporate network trunks...it's too unreliable and unsecure, and can have unpredictable bandwidth issues. Companies will want dedicated primary bandwidth, with the 'net as a possible backup.

If you want a stable future in IT, take up programming. If you're good at it, you can roll with the changes and learn the new languages and paradigms as they arrive.

Dan64456

Couldn't have said it better myself. I currently work in IT and I don't see too much of a future for the reasons above (Google providing business services such as email and storage). Plus even today with the jobs around, you can't be a network engineer without working every Saturday and Sunday, plus the rest of the 5 days per week, and nights. It sucks because you are better off knowing one rare niche than you are knowing a lot of everything (like an engineer). Pay is better, and you're not nearly as responsible off the clock as a network engineer is. Go the software development / programmer route. The admin assistants at my company get paid more than I do and all they know how to do is filter their boss’s emails and make entries in their outlook calendars. IT sucks.

tortue

I would stay away from the certification track. For serious employers and folks who need you to do actual work, they want clue & experience, not fancy certs. Plus, most of the stuff you'll learn in the certification track is going to be outdated and useless in the real world. The only cert stuff that I've ever seen get it right is the Juniper certs, which try to stay somewhat agnostic when it comes to protocol selection (Cisco can be bigots).

These days, CCIE's are a joke and they should adjust the number to include the amount of times someone has attempted to take it. The only good CCIE's are the one with the low-digits.

What I would recommend is the following:

-Obtain several books that focus on teaching the technology, not a vendors specific slant on the technology. Ciscopress is horrible and teaches you the Cisco-way of doing things. There are better, neutral publications out.

-Follow the _operator_ mailing lists, such as NANOG, cisco-nsp and juniper-nsp. Go to the NANOG website (nanog.org) and start looking at presentations & tutorials. They are there to educate you and they're going to do it better than most books or any class would teach you.

-Play with stuff at home. You can obtain Cisco IOS emulators and build your own Juniper router at home and try things out live on your own network:
Olive - Juniper Clue
Cisco 7200 Simulator - IPFlow Netflow Collector

Juniper JUNOS is basically FreeBSD under the hood and folks have built Cisco 7200 emulators which can load a Cisco IOS image.

Anyhow, if you are serious about getting into the field, PM me and I can give some more tips.

tortue

No way. The majority of network engineers running the Internet are doing so with high school diplomas. I'd recommend to go to a NANOG and realize that the 20-30-40 year olds there aren't running around with MS-EE degrees. It's experience + clue that makes everything work. Are there folks with degrees around? Sure a few, but you don't need one to get involved in network engineering in a large scale. The nice thing about this country is that at some point, no one cares about what paper you have if you can get the job done right. I can point to several network architects/engineers at Yahoo, Google, AT&T, Level (3), Global Crossing, etc. as examples of folks with no degree.

Cloud computing providers (the good ones) have been known to purchase direct connectivity into enterprise existing L3VPNs or directly into their offices to bypass the unpredictability of the Internet. Remember that one of the best benefits of the "cloud" is the ability for an enterprise to finally retire that 10-15 year old datacenter which has horrible power efficiency. Not to mention, that with Amazon EC2/S3 and other cloud offerings, the IT staff can mimic each server on a 1:1 basis until they're fully transitioned over. In 10 years from now, it won't be able 1:1 server replacement, it will be having all applications within your domain using a small set of 10-15 binaries and just API calls (a la Google AppEngine). But that's still a long ways off.

I disagree with this one. Right now, there is a huge amount of movement in this country to outsource programming/coding to India and other places overseas. Are there competent programmers in the US who are getting treated well? Yes, but they are also -great- at what they do. It's highly competitive and if you don't have the skill for it, I wouldn't bother.

UASIT

I hear you on the certs...I've been knocking them out and I don't crack the vendor books...Just getting them with my years in the field / experience. In the past month I've taken the CCNA, Security +, Network +, VM Ware VCP4, and next month CISSP...

My company pays me back for the certification exam fee so I figured why not...I'm not taking any classes towards my Masters this year so the certs a re a good diversion...

I love the IT field and find it to be very rewarding...

I also like how it is always evolving and there are many areas to branch off into...Currently I'm working with UAS...Before that I was in telecom engineering for the feds...