I get quite a few emails of people asking me for troubleshooting tips and tricks as well as assistance with problems.
I wish I had a dollar every time I suggest people get familiar with their tools, play with them, and determine their limitations with specific tools. You wouldn’t troubleshoot a cabling issue with Wireshark, would you?
What would you think about a baseball player not going to the batting cage and expecting to play in the major leagues, or a hockey player who refuses to go to hockey boot camp or practice.
The funniest thing, is that you do not need a fancy lab and a lot of equipment for your exercises or to practice. You can take most tasks that you do every day and turn it into an exercise.
Here are some examples that I perform almost daily to keep my skills relatively sharp.:
- just start a Wireshark capture
- review a trace
- ping something, trace route while capturing
- look at my ARP table in Windows or Linux
In this video, I use Kali Linux and Wireshark and nmap to illustrate an example of a simple exercise you can perform as well.