Good pages / Programms for getting some IT knowledge ?

[Youkai]

Hi there !
I am learning to be a IT System integrator and currently the main part of my work is Installing Windows and waiting till someone calls me for Support ^^V so sometimes I have like 8 hours free time and sometimes I have to stay 10hours and more to get everything done ....

And in those times where I somehow have nothing important to do for 8 hours (well I always have some small stuff but often nothing much) It would be best to learn something as I am currently only learning by doing including try and error, plus the very very very Basics every child knows, in School.

I already found a German webpage called ElektronikQuest which is like who wants to be a millionaire only that you don't loose if you give a wrong answer and you can get help before and after answering which is really good as you can learn very much from it BUT it is I think 30 questions a day or pay
Would be nice if someone knew some other interesting sites no matter if English or German .... I even think my English is better than my German so you can Imagine how bad I am at my own language XD


oh yeah even though it might not help anyone here ... still the link to that ElektronikQuest just as a reference
http://www.elektronik-quest.de/

 

[FAST6191]

I take it you have figured out the big secret of IT -- most of it is sitting around and watching percentage bars.

Any poke the questions/quizzes and get some hands on time.

Tools
https://www.virtualbox.org/
http://www.proxmox.com/proxmox-ve
Plus 16 gigs of RAM if you did not already have it. You can do it on less but why not make life easy.

Toys
http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html
http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-enterprise

Use the tools to play with the toys: build file servers, build database severs, build network gateways, get windows machines* to speak to linux ones and vice versa. build a VOIP system, SSH into one machine and fiddle with it. If you are pasting in a command you do not have an idea of what each part of it does then guess what you are doing for the next half hour.
Get someone that knows computers to break it for you and then spend the time fixing it.
If you can get a few old laptops, raspberry pis, android devices... to go on the network as well then even better. If someone is throwing something out then grab it for your lab.

*hopefully the place you are working for has a MSDN or similar subscription, also if they are sending you on whatever the MCSE is called these days then they tend to come with a nice subscription to such things.

 

[Youkai]

Well I am only using a Laptop currently so 6GB ram and no space for more left ^^V

I am using VMware on my machine and played a little bit with Windows Server 2012 already but I have to admit that my current knowledge is not sufficient for this stuff...

I might try some of those "toys" as you call them, the only problem is as my company is not really a company and as I am only in training I am not allowed to do "everything"
they already had a nice job trainee a while back who made a DHCP server on his Virtual machine and hooked it up the network causing many problems as it was interfering with the existing DHCP server ^^V so now I usually have to cut all network connections when doing anything "new" which would be bad when using those Programs


But thanks already, maybe I can read myself into those a little bit and get the ok for testing them


P.S. I don't think we have a MSDN subscription as we do not develop anything ... we are mostly doing internal network support and hardware support.
Not sure about MCSE, we have two guys who have this certification I think but not sure if they let me do it as well ...

 

[FAST6191]

Oh yeah don't play on a live/production network, or at the very least do it on your own walled off part of it (preferably an actual walled off part where you have your own gateway which connects to the network proper, if you want to risk subnets then I guess that can work)... which come to think of it is a good thing to know how to do when you have to do proper networking. Mind you a second dhcp server makes for a pretty nice way to experiment with dhcp exhaustion attacks.

6 gigs is enough to do maybe two or three machines on (2 gigs per VM is more than enough for much of this, probably more like 1 if you are mainly just playing with things and not doing day to day stuff on the same VM), the 16 was more so you could build up enough machines to approximate a real network.

If you prefer to watch some videos then
http://www.youtube.com/user/elithecomputerguy/
His later/more recent talky stuff does OK for me but the classes side of things is probably better for what you want, he does some telecoms stuff as well which I imagine you are probably looking at and not looking forward to/considering a hole in your knowledge.

As most of computing is dry as anything then I might also suggest
http://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile/videos

For a kind of basic appreciation of programming (you may not want to be a programmer but being able to knock out a script to do some stuff is definitely something you want to know) I have seen worse than
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL36E7A2B75028A3D6

I do not really have so many videos you can learn from, or even that much in the way of basics in text form. Mind you most of the videos I do watch (hacker conference stuff) do tend to do a very quick crash course in the basics of a concept when they are going on to detail how they made it fall over/do something it was never intended to do.

MSDN kind of took over from TechNet last year some time, even if you did not do development your company might have had to test a deployment/windows update/windows upgrade which is what TechNet was for and what MSDN kind of half does now. Mind you a lot of windows comes with a 30 day trial (plus, you know... it is not exactly hard to work around that) which is more than enough to support you messing around with a concept.

 

[PityOnU]

Hi there !
I am learning to be a IT System integrator and currently the main part of my work is Installing Windows and waiting till someone calls me for Support ^^V so sometimes I have like 8 hours free time and sometimes I have to stay 10hours and more to get everything done ....

And in those times where I somehow have nothing important to do for 8 hours (well I always have some small stuff but often nothing much) It would be best to learn something as I am currently only learning by doing including try and error, plus the very very very Basics every child knows, in School.

I already found a German webpage called ElektronikQuest which is like who wants to be a millionaire only that you don't loose if you give a wrong answer and you can get help before and after answering which is really good as you can learn very much from it BUT it is I think 30 questions a day or pay
Would be nice if someone knew some other interesting sites no matter if English or German .... I even think my English is better than my German so you can Imagine how bad I am at my own language XD


oh yeah even though it might not help anyone here ... still the link to that ElektronikQuest just as a reference
http://www.elektronik-quest.de/

Great idea to get some qualifications. I went and got a bunch of Microsoft certifications 5 or so years back and I still get people calling me every now and then asking me for a resume because they need some server work done or whatever else.

Microsoft has a series of self-learning books to do exactly what you want. They aren't free, but I hear there are some sites out there where you can download things you usually need to pay for free.

The books are totally awesome, teach you more than you ever thought was even possible to learn, and afterwards you can sign up for and take a certification test. If you pass, you will have proof that you know what you are talking about and employers like that a lot.

Hope that helps!

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Pity has the right idea, I've..."acquired" a few of those books from Microsoft, they do teach you a lot about Windows and PCs in general. Getting Microsoft Certifications are very helpful for showing current and future employers that you have legit knowledge.

Something a little...less "legit" is simply Googling any big problems that may come along, that you might not know how to fix. There's a web hosting/data center that I "toured" while looking for a job, a good 3/4's of the employees just googled any problems customers had A little less helpful for learning in general, but it's also not a terrible idea if you get stuck while you're still learning.