[toast0]

As someone with a good deal of networkimg knowledge, yeah, most people don't have very much.

You can do a lot without knowing anything about routing, and very little about protocols. And all those network people always seem grumpy, why learn about it if you don't want to be grumpy. ;p

Edit to add: how networking works in reality and how networking works in books and coursework tends to be quite different as well. GeoDNS and Anycast IP are a big conceptual jump for people who only understood networks from coursework. There's also a common assumption that routing protocols favor least distance routing which is certainly not the case. I may be obsessed with path MTU problems, but that's a real hard concept to explain to experienced tech people with slim networking knowledge. Also, a lot of people seem to believe the OSI model is fact and not a model of the world; it's not unuseful, but there's lots of hardware and software that operates at more than one OSI layer simultaneously and people stuck on a rigid model can have an incorrect view of the world which impedes their problem solving.