Tuesday 6 March 2018

A few things I've learned about computer networking

Somebody asked a few months ago “hey, what’s the best way to understand computer networking?”. I don’t really know how to answer this question – I’ve learned a lot of the things I know at work, and I think picking up new things when I need them has been fine.

But I thought it could maybe be useful to list a bunch of concrete skills and concepts I’ve learned along the way. Like anything else, “computer networking” involves a large number of different concepts and skills and tools and I’ve learned them all one at a time. I picked most of these things up over the last 4 years.

  • How to set up an Apache web server by copying and pasting things from the internet. (pre-2010)
  • What a http request looks like (GET, POST, etc). How to use curl to send GET and POST requests. (2010?)
  • How to send a http request by hand with netcat (2013)
  • how to do ARP spoofing (and what ARP is)
  • What a MAC address is and how packets are addressed to a MAC address on a local network
  • How traceroute works (which involves learning the basics of how the the IP protocol works and what a TTL is)
  • What a network packet is, how to look at a networking packet with Wireshark
  • The basics of how TCP works (for example by looking at an http request with wireshark, and by building a tcp stack in Python). Key things: what’s a SYN packet?
  • how DNS works (like, what’s an A record, what’s a CNAME record, what does a DNS query look like – wireshark is good here too).
  • More HTTP (like cache headers and how they interact with CDNs). More about what CDNs are for
  • MTU exists and can cause networking issues
  • Having badly tuned TCP connection settings (like TCP_NODELAY) can cause noticeable networking performanace issues (why you should understand (a little) about TCP) (2015)
  • HTTP security headers like CORS
  • What “SNI” means
  • how to use tcpdump to debug firewall issues (2016)
  • how to capture packets with tcpdump in somewhat weird ways (for instance “only this very specific kind of DNS response”)
  • “can reliably use tcpdump without reading the man page”
  • SSL/TLS: what’s a SSL cert? how do I get one issued? how is a SSL cert put together? (tools: openssl x509). here’s a blog post about TLS
  • more advanced HTTP+SSL stuff, like the Strict-Transport-Security header
  • very basic understanding of what BGP is and how packets get routed on the internet
  • slightly more advanced DNS (what’s an authoritative dns server, what’s a recursive dns server)
  • a vague understanding of how the linux networking stack handles packets, like – do packets get sent to tcpdump before or after routing? (after!)
  • how to slow down my internet on purpose with tc
  • how to set up NAT rules with iptables
  • how to inspect a route table with iproute2
  • container/docker networking (network namespaces, route tables) (2017)

tools I’ve found useful

Per this tweet:

  • ping (are these computer connected??)
  • whois (is this domain registered)
  • ssh
  • curl (for making HTTP requests)
  • tcpdump (record packets! check for traffic on a port!)
  • dig/nslookup (debugging DNS issues)
  • netstat/ss (is that port being used?)
  • ifconfig (what’s my IP address?)
  • iproute2 (that is, the ip command. replacement for ifconfig. very useful.)
  • wireshark (look at packets with a GUI)
  • ngrep (grep for your network)
  • iptables
  • socat (connect a unix domain socket to a tcp socket)
  • nsenter for debugging container networking problems

learning takes a lot of time

I spend a fair amount of time trying to learn new computer things. I’ve found it really useful to take it one step at a time – my learning process with a lot of this stuff is basically

  • identify something small I don’t know (how to, from the command line, check the expiration date on https://google.com's TLS certificate)
  • figure it out (sometimes with help from my great coworkers)
  • repeat

That’s all! It’s really fun to see how learning a bunch of tiny things adds up over time. Like today I feel like I can handle most things about computer networking that I run into in my job, and I don’t feel like there are that many Big New Ideas about networking I don’t know about. (though, well, wifi is still a mystery to me :) )



Read the full article here by Julia Evans

No comments: