On Tuesday 19 Aug 2008, Amit Joshi wrote:
I agree that it would be a better idea to spend money on buying new hardware instead of joining an Institute. But I think there are some units in those modules where you have to learn Networking with a cluster of systems. It won't be easy to do that at home, although I am aware of various network simulation softwares available these days. Are there any suggestions regarding learning the networking part of the exam at home?
Virtualization, there are several options. virtual box (open source edition) is fairly easy to setup and comes with fairly good documentation. On a system with with say 2GB RAM and a Dual Core 2.0GHz CPU, you could very well run 2 virtual machines for a total of three including the host system. It may not be possible to simulate every network scenario on such a setup.
On networking, an excellent intro book is "The Linux Network Administrator's Guide," Second Edition by Olaf Kirch and Terry Dawson available here http://www.tldp.org/guides.html
HTH, -- Arun Khan