Netlab Journal

About me

In short

Context

I’m creating this series to document my learning in the networking field. I’d describe my prior networking knowledge as technically thin but theoretically solid: I can find my way around various texts and understand the thought process behind a real-world solution. My technical understanding of IT comes primarily from my development background (a year and a half of full-stack web development). A good part of my current understanding of networks also comes from studying for the CCNA exam, which I recently passed.

Driven by the desire for a more stable and promising career, mainly because of the growing trend of replacing junior and mid-level programmers with AI models in a utopian pursuit of a cheaper yet more productive business model, I decided to steer my career toward the part of IT that I believe can’t be largely replaced by artificial intelligence. After that statement I may look like a hypocrite, because I use AI every day myself, even as one of my main tools for learning and for getting my full-time web development job done. There’s no escaping it, and it’s true that it makes us more productive, but I’m afraid of the long-term price of that productivity. It’s a deep topic that no single person can give a definitive answer to, so I won’t spend much time on it.

Preparation

Since I had no luck looking for a junior network engineer or junior network security job with my current CV, I realized that HR teams don’t care much about my programming background or the fact that I formally have some networking knowledge. It makes sense that hands-on networking experience comes first, but that’s the classic catch-22 of needing experience to get a job while needing a job to get experience.

That’s why I came up with the idea of creating a collection of containerlab projects in which I show my thought process when configuring real network topologies to a potential employer. Everything I’ll use here is new to me: the only network operating system I’ve worked with is Cisco IOS and a little FortiOS, and I’ve never used Nokia SR Linux, VyOS, OPNsense and similar ones. I chose them because they’re free to use and I hear they’re used in real environments too.

I’ll use draw.io to create illustrations of the network topologies and for planning, and I’ll publish all my configurations to a public GitHub repository so the labs can be recreated on other machines.

Since I have no experience with containerlab or Nokia SR Linux, the first few labs will be a simple introduction to their features and how they work.

I picked SR Linux as the primary L3 device for my labs because it’s open (not “open-source open”), free, and I’ve heard it’s used in production environments around the world. The alternative I found is VyOS, but I would have to run it as a full virtual machine, so for now Nokia SRL is my favorite.

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