[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.