The majority of my career as IT professional has been spent in configuring, handling and troubleshooting various networks.
As my formal education regarding this has been quite sparse, I’ve been pushed to try to really understand what happens and how to use/prevent different behaviour to make the network function in a desired manner.
And as I have not only done inhouse network managment, where I’ve been in contol of the hardware I’ve needed to not just understand how different vendors implement different technologies and what namingconventions they use. I’ve needed to grasp the core – what happens in reality – and then I would map the different vendor variants to that knowledge.
I can’t say that I’m an expert regarding any line of products or any kind of network setup, but the mindset and angle of attack that I’ve developed during those years have helped me to start figuring out how a network setup are intended to worki, no matter what brand of router, switches, accesspoints or other equipment used.
Quite often I’ve come to a new customer to figure out their present network setup. Hopefully I get a login to their router and other equipment. From there I’ve had to figure out what kind of setup was implemented and how to extend, replace or troubleshoot from there. This has forced me to poke around in – among others – Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, Check Point, Mikrotik and Ubiquity.
And of course the more consumerlevel equipment from Zyxel, TP-Link, ASUS, Technicolor and so on.