First off, howdy and welcome to the inaugural post of the EtherGeek blog. My name is Josh Stephens and I’m Head Geek and VP of Technology at SolarWinds, an IT management software company in Austin.

Network troubleshooting doesn’t have to be a panic-driven guessing game. By using structured methods like the OSI model and core diagnostic commands, you can pinpoint issues quickly. Whether you’re at ...

From the OSI and TCP/IP models to subnetting, commands, and real-world fixes, understanding networking fundamentals is key to building, maintaining, and troubleshooting secure, efficient systems. By ...

Thanks for your comments on my first EtherGeek post on understanding the OSI Model. I especially enjoyed learning new ways to remember the OSI Model; for example: Please Do Not Throw Stale Pizza Away.

Most IT users will be familiar by now with the idea of `the software-defined something or other’. Indeed, there vendors that already talked about software-defined everything, which really should cover ...

Knowledge of the structure of Internet Protocol (IP) packets is a fundamental part of understanding the Internet and how information moves from one point to another. The benefits of such knowledge ...

Getting started on designing a network is a task of formidable proportions, but all the more so if you are looking to build a secure IT network. Often, IT system administrators are not fully familiar ...