What every network administrator should know

For the past decade, Technical Framework has been delivering expert administration services to a number of stakeholders. Over the years we have refined our delivery across the many task sets of network administration, staying at the leading edge of service provision and incorporating new developments in our practices. With this experience comes understanding and insight. Our findings can be distilled and refined to the following:

IP Addressing

Keep a log of all IP addresses as you will need these when you are trying to diagnose any problems, especially any conflicts where there are two or more devices that are trying to claim the same IP. Good administrators will minimize the occurrence of this issue using IP subnetting, banding together a group of IP addresses into a single parent address. It is critical for network admins to understand how MAC addresses function, as they provide the identifiers for Ethernet adapters and devices. Make sure you know what the default gateway address is as a major part of the job is utilizing these numbers to help you assess and repair any issues that may arise.

Firewalls

As a network administrator, you need to be able to quickly and accurately assess any firewall related faults or issues, be able to make vital changes to the settings of the firewall and ensure that your clients are able to operate effectively and safely through the firewall. It is important that you are able to get the balance right to ensure maximum safety with minimum inconvenience.

DNS Reverse Lookups

DNS reverse lookups are another vital aspect of the network administrator role. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your network tools are, you will have to be able to find out DNS details and examine them correctly. You need to be able to use DNS reverse lookups when you are trying to diagnose problems, sort out email, reduce spam and scrutinize incoming communications.

WAN, LAN and NAT

These three form a key part of the underlying network architecture. Your network will either be a wide area network (WAN) or a local area network (LAN). Being able to work with either is essential in your role as a network administrator. The network will utilize private IPs that are then converted into public address using network address translation (NAT). A good network administrator is able to ensure these three work in harmony.

Operating Systems

A key aspect of administration is being able to use the different operating systems. It is important to have a good working knowledge of Linux, Windows, and Mac OS as you will encounter these on a daily basis. Over the years as the leading Fort Collins IT Consulting firm, we have dealt with nearly every OS there is.

Cloud

The rise of cloud computing has placed new demands on network administrators. Just because the servers are virtual it does not mean that there is nothing for the administrator to do, keeping up with the changes is vital for any good administrator.