[gosub100]

If the tools to set up a network actually did what I asked them to, this page would be simple. In another comment you compared it to a node.js script.

The difference between networking and programming is when you call a function it will actually do what you say, every time. In a network you can waste hours and get absolutely nowhere.

I've been in IT and software for 25 years at various levels both as a job and a hobby, and I can confidently say that networking is the biggest waste of time, most frustrating, and least rewarding aspect of working with computers. No matter what I try to set up, it never, I mean never works the way I want it to. And I've done plenty of projects to get a healthy sampling, some of them include NFS/CIFS, RDP, DHCPD+PXE, VPN, IPFW, BIND, iptables, SMTP/IMAP. Working with anything networking is absolute hell. Every single time. Guaranteed.

[elevation]

> NFS/CIFS, RDP, DHCPD+PXE, VPN, IPFW, BIND, iptables, SMTP/IMAP

The hardest part of configuring the services you list is not the networking, but all the non-networking topics you need to be familiar with: zone file syntax; cipher suite selection; OS-specific security policy and permissions models; PKI administration; PXE ROM peculiarities, etc.

Once you're confident with arp, addressing/subnetting, routing tables, and a few other tools like netstat and `dig` you can quickly eliminate the network as the cause of the issue and focus on grokking the application itself.

[gosub100]

Then we have different definitions of the word. That's fine, the top comment at the time of my posting made it sound like "networking" was understanding the interactions of optical repeaters on the glass cable. To me "networking" means actually using network applications for my benefit.