Top Networking Skills IT Professionals Should Learn Before 2027

The /26 example is a clean way to teach subnetting, and one caveat worth adding for the cloud section: 62 usable hosts per /26 holds for a conventional LAN, but in AWS a subnet reserves five addresses (.0 network, .1 VPC router, .2 DNS server, .3 reserved, .255 broadcast), so a /26 there yields 59 usable addresses. That difference catches people out when they size VPC subnets for a fixed number of hosts. On the troubleshooting workflow, one more useful split: if a host can reach its gateway but not resolve names, testing whether the DNS server itself answers on port 53 separates a DNS problem from a path or firewall problem, rather than relying on nslookup alone.