Update: Week 02

I have begun my journey into networking and preparing for the CompTIA Network+ exam.

Highlights

• Started learning networking foundational knowledge and key concepts using Professor Messer’s CompTIA Network+ prep course lectures on YouTube
• Familiarized myself with Wireshark and planned to work through the Wireshark User’s Guide this week

The Long Story

My project has the dual purpose of preparing me for the CompTIA Network+ exam and building a portfolio project to show prospective employers. I’ll be building a network traffic analyzer. Professor Guinn was awesome and helped outline a ten week plan. I began working networking foundational knowledge and key concepts using Professor Messer’s CompTIA Network+ prep course lectures on YouTube. I’ve chipped away at learning the OSI model, some key port numbers, and IP addressing, just to name a few heavy-hitter topics. I already had Wireshark downloaded but updated to the most current version and poked around, just to familiarize myself with it. I plan on working through the Wireshark User’s Guide this week.

I’m also trying to decide if I work in MacOS or if I use a virtual machine on my mac with Linux. If I were to go the Linux route, which distribution would be best aligned with my goals? From my research I was thinking RHEL or Kali maybe?

The biggest impediment is time management at this point. I am taking a very heavy course load to wrap up my last semester of CSPB, and I’m trying to get my feet under me after the first week. I think I could do a better job of outlining my weekly tasks rather than letting them bounce around in my head and completing them in an ad hoc manner. This week I’ve created a kanban for each of my classes in Obsidian to see what I need to be doing and strategize the approach.

Addendum

I was wisely advised to use Ubuntu as my Linux distribution for this project. This is great, I’m already familiar with that distro and it should provide a solid environment for working with networking tools and Wireshark.