The Packet University

The Packet University is a community for training, understanding and learning of networking concepts. A couple of things that set this organization apart from others are the fact that our focus is a vendor neutral approach that focuses on protocols rather than products. Another is our bottom up approach to training that we institute leading to a more complete understanding of concepts. More information can be found on our "About" page of the website.

All content found that is found free of charge on packetu.com is considered public domain. There is no license provided and none required. If you would like to use any of our free content for a presentation to a group, that is fine. If you can profit from it, more power to you. If convenient and possible, we would appreciate credit for the materials. If there are any laws broken for software required to play our content, we are not responsible and cannot be held liable in any way. If you would like a format that is not available for download, please contact us via the web site. We provide such materials if they are easily producible.

Currently it is not funded. I am donating my time and money toward what I believe to be a worthwhile investment in the Internet community. We have some ideas on how to fund it on a go forward basis after we gain some popularity. In any case, the free content that you find on this site will always be free. We believe that there should be a good source for protocol understanding that bridges the gap between the RFC's and the GUIs. Bridging that gap is our goal and we intend to keep it free for the community.

Since I work for a network consulting firm, I do not do any competing work outside of that context. If you would like to contact my employer, Lexnet, Inc, for rates and availability you can do so by visiting their website.

PacketCasts will be available the first Friday of every month. Initially these will be in the Flash format. The front page of The Packet University will contain links to the show notes for each cast. The notes will contain a summary, relevant links and a PowerPacket containing everything you need to retrofit your home lab as well as the actual capture files. Our front page will have an RSS feed to aid in keeping up with new casts as they are made available. In the near future, we may provide feeds for video and/or audio podcasts.

There are already good programs that address the training on these products. Additionally, this site is dedicated to teaching protocols instead of products. These vendors teach protocols only as they pertain to their product. We do believe there are valid reasons to teach these products from the wire instead of how most vendor curriculum is put together. However, that is not the intent of this site.