Networking for System Administrators

What Hacker News says

1. hiAndrewQuinnJun 2025
   I like maximalist prompts, and indeed Starship is what Shell Bling Ubuntu [1] installs on a new dev machine. But they're not everyone's cup of tea.

   If I wanted to recommend to someone the min-maxed, highest density thing they could add to their prompt, it would simply be the time your current prompt appeared + the amount of time the last command you ran took.

   These two pieces of information together make it very easy for you (or your local sysadmin (or an LLM looking over your digital shoulder)) to piece together a log of exactly what happened when. This kind of psuedo-non-repudiation can be invaluable for debugging sessions when you least expect it.

   This was a tip I distilled from Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators a few years ago, which remains my preferred recommendation for any developers looking to learn just enough about networking to not feel totally lost when talking to an actual network engineer.

   Bonus nerd points if you measure time in seconds since the UNIX epoch. Very easy and fast to run time delta calculations if you do that:

       [0 1719242840] $ echo "foo"
       [0 1719242905] $ echo "fell asleep before hitting enter" && sleep 5
       [5 1719242910] $
   

   [1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu
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2. hiAndrewQuinnDec 2024
   I constantly think to myself that I should make a high quality Anki deck for teaching and retaining the low level networking basics. Even after a college course on the subject the only way it truly clicked with me in a laying way was by Ankifying Michael W. Lucas's phenomenal Networking for System Administrators, and now a solid 30% of problems I run across on a daily basis are made easier by having that knowledge at my fingertips.
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3. hiAndrewQuinnFeb 2024
   Spaced repetition is great! Reading and making around 300 Anki cards out of Networking for System Administrators was one of the highest ROI things I did in a while - I finally understand at a high level how all those networking stacks actually work together, and I know a bunch of useful new command line tools to boot.
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4. hiAndrewQuinnFeb 2024
   Networking for System Administrators is often my recommendation for this. The author walks all the way up the stack from the physical layer up and name-drops every program and file he uses: `ethtool`, `/etc/hosts`, `/etc/resolv.conf`, `ipconfig`, `netcat`, `tcpdump` ...

   I quite liked the accessible style, and got a lot out of making Anki flashcards for all of them.

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5. hiAndrewQuinnJan 2024
   Sitting down with Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators and making Anki flashcards out of them was probably the highest impact thing I did for my career last spring. It's an incredible tool, truly.

   Anyone else who wants to learn just enough networking to never be 100% stumped by it again, I recommend both tools.

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6. hiAndrewQuinnOct 2023
   I came here to say Anki is my lifeline for grokking difficult things like DNS.

   It was in fact on jvns.ca's book recommendation that I got Michael W. Lucas's _Networking for System Administrators_, and strip mined it for Anki cards containing both technical know-how and more than a little sysadmin wisdom.

   It might be one of the highest ROI books I've ever read, considering I actually remember how to use things like nectat and tcpdump to debug transport layer issues at a moment's notice now.

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