New to IT Field

awilliams1130

Hello, I am new to the IT field and have never used a forum before, so bear with me. I am currently going to school for my CCNA and right now I am taking the Cisco 1 course, I have taken other courses as far as TCP/IP and basic networking, yet I am still having a terrible time with the whole subneting idea, can anyone tell me how often you have to use subnetting in an entry level IT job?AW

rogue2shadow

Subnetting is an extremely valuable skill and is used more often than you think. You can use subnetting for reverse-engineering (security), designing a network (VLANs, domains), and it has many other applications.

Its use at an entry level job depends on what the job actually entails and the responsibilities that are dealt out to your by your employer/boss.

A great place for basic subnetting questions is the following:
subnettingquestions.com - Free Subnetting Questions and Answers Randomly Generated Online

RobertKaucher

Learn it now. It does not matter how often you need to do it, the importance of it is so foundational that it cannot be overstated.

Learn the theory and how to do the math.

Then memorize the following:
Netmask values in binary: 1000 0000 = 128, 1100 0000 = 192, etc
Also memorize the increments on page 488 of this book:
Network warrior - Google Books#

Once I learned the theory I did the two things above and was able to subnet in my head. Since I have moved more to databases, I have lost the skill. But it was totally worth the 5 minutes a day over just a few weeks that I dedicated to it.

Bl8ckr0uter

It is a very good skill but honestly most engineers I have seen use calculators. It is good to be able to do it in your head however.

erpadmin

Bl8ckr0uter wrote: »

It is a very good skill but honestly most engineers I have seen use calculators. It is good to be able to do it in your head however.

I hope those engineers know how to do it by hand.

One thing I learned in college....never take a shortcut without knowing the main route.

To awilliams, you definitely want to heed the above posts. Yes, there are subnetting calculators, but if you don't know how to do it by hand (and you may have to do it in an interview...a good number of network folks can attest to that) you might not get the job.

But once you know how to do it...then you can use a calculator as bl8ckr0ut3r [better l337 spelling] suggests.