Updated 28/09/25
Are you an Australian student studying network engineering? I have a TAFE diploma in information technology & networking and experience working as a sole trader as a network engineer. To assist the Australian students to fulfill a skills shortage, I have made a few videos to explain the basics of network engineering.
In this video, I will explain the physical layer and DHCP. The physical layer includes Cat6 copper ethernet cables, fiber cables, ethernet wall outlets and network infrastructure such as patch panels, network switches and router. DHCP provides network addressing for network devices. Each network device, including computers, your mobile phone and routers have an IP address. An IP address can be statically assigned or dynamically assigned. DHCP dynamically assigns IP addresses from a pool of addresses within a subnet.
For a practical exercise, I recommend students to download Cisco Packet Tracer. Cisco Packet Tracer is a useful tool for building and testing networks in a lab environment. To download CISCO packet tracer, you will need to navigate to and subscribe to the CISCO website.
In this video, I have expanded on the network, I have included more computers, switches, servers and business telephony (VOIP). VOIP typically works with the session initiation protocol (SIP), however, CISCO packet tracer does not include an option to emulate SIP so instead, I use the CISCO 2811 router that can handle a VOIP service. In this the video, I demonstrate a basic VOIP configuration and a working VOIP service
In this video, I demonstrate how to set up a lab environment for non-CISCO hardware. The application GSN3 allows a network engineer to build a virtual lab environment using images
of network devices. An image is a virtual copy of a network switch, router or firewall. To acquire GSN3 you will need to navigate and subscribe to the GNS3 website. You will also need to acquire an image of a network device to test by navigatiung to the vendors website to explore if they offer an evaluation image of the network device.
GSN3, does require a server to run these images. You can create a server on your own personal computer via downloading VMware, Hyper-V or VirtualBox. Images will use system resources, so if your computer is on the low spec side, you may only be able to run one image. In this video, I use an image of a Juniper vSRX firewall device.
In this video, I also cover the importance of testing a network configuration in a lab before configuring a network in a live production environment. I recommend that before you configure a live network, you first acquire the network topology and a copy of the running configuration of the network device. Then, you create a documentation plan of how you will deploy the network update and included in this documentation plan will be your contingency plan that details what you would do if the network update does not go to plan.
In this video, I demonstrate how to connect to a Juniper vSRX network firewall device to back up the configuration of the device. To back up a network device configuration you will use secure socket shell (SSH) and the secure copy protocol (SCP). You will need to enable SSH on your computer, so your computer acts as an SSH server. You will also need to create an encrypted directory on your computer to securely store network device configuration files.
Typically, you will connect your computer to the same network as the network device that you are working on. You can do this by connecting to WiFi or via a Cat6 cable. You may also require a console cable to connect to the console port of the network device. When you connect to the device, before you deploy any configuration changes you should first back up the running network configuration of that device, you will do this by connecting to your computer via the network device via SSH. This way, if you make an error you can always restore the running network configuration.