Free Online Network Management Tutorials

¶ … internet is its near-instant access to literally thousands of tutorials, lessons, and how-to guides. Ranging from the mundane to the extremely esoteric, these lessons grant the user amazing amounts of information for free. Technology tutorials are perfect for this medium, as they are usually step-by-step and provide a thorough method of learning.

Windows Networking, a website devoted to learning networking offers a tutorial through the Windows operating system. It's called 10 Ways to Troubleshoot DNS Resolution Issues, and as its name implies it provides a step-by-step guide to solve DNS resolution issues. The author helpfully includes a series of pictures, diagrams and an enumerated list of each issue to guide the reader through the article. Technically this is not a tutorial so much as a how-to guide, but seeing as it focuses on an issue that many network administrators have to deal with on a regular basis, it is an interesting tutorial to peruse when one has the time and desire to do so.

The guide is organized by most likely occurrences, such as erroneously blaming network failure to a DNS resolution issue, to least likely (ISP error). It is a useful way to organize it, as you can thoroughly traverse the list and try out each issue and slowly conclude what the problem is. Each enumerated item starts with an explanation about the issue. For instance, the poor network connectivity issue is illustrated by describing how a bad connection can lead to an erroneous belief in a DNS resolution failure. What follows is a clarification of the issue, such as what causes the issue, then a sparse guide on how to solve the problem.

This is a great way to organize each separate issue. It forces you to understand the issue, and the pictures that are helpfully included ensure that your attempts to resolve the issue do not go awry. Furthermore, the article leaves no stone unturned as it systematically goes through most possible resolution errors. To a normal user, however, there can be a few issues.

For instance jargon is not avoided, in fact the author seems to revel in it sometimes.

An example of that jargon would be, "If you are looking up a local host on a DNS server that your PC is a member of, you might be connecting to a host and not using the FQDN (fully qualified DNS name) and counting on the DNS suffix to help out." (Davis. 2009) The reader can tell that this is not the simplest way to illuminate what is happening. The average user would either be confused to the point of turning away and finding another tutorial or would turn towards the pictures in the hope of a simpler explanation. Fortunately, the pictures themselves are fantastic. Simply clicking through the pictures and following their gradual explanations will be a boon to any user.