[ WELCOME · START HERE ]

NEW HERE?
HERE'S WHERE TO START._

TheLineman is a hands-on CCNA + networking blog by Dylan Doyle — CCNA candidate, network analyst at Halton DSB, and Fortinet home lab operator. Every article, lab, and tool here is documented from real work, real gear, and real mistakes. Pick your path below.

★ HERE FOR THE CCNA? GO STRAIGHT TO THE STUDY HUB ★ All 53 official exam topics, ordered for study, linked to every covered resource on the site ▶

★ PICK YOUR PATH

[ CCNA · STUDY ] STUDYING FOR
YOUR CCNA? Subnetting, routing, switching — concepts explained from someone actively in the exam grind.
Why Subnetting Finally Clicked CIDR Cheat Sheet — /8 to /32 Reference Lab 3 — STP Root Bridge Election (Interactive) Lab 4 — Rapid Spanning Tree (Packet Tracer) OSPF Explained — Link-State Routing for the CCNA Lab 5 — OSPF Single-Area (Packet Tracer) OSPF Adjacency States — Why Yours Is Stuck in EXSTART Lab 6 — Static & Floating Static Routes (Packet Tracer) Lab 7 — EtherChannel (PAgP, LACP, Static) OSPF Multi-Area & LSA Types — What Each LSA Carries Lab 8 — OSPF Multi-Area (Packet Tracer) Lab 9 — CDP & LLDP Neighbor Discovery (Packet Tracer) IPv6 for the CCNA — Compression, Types & EUI-64 How I Structure My Study Sessions
[ HOME LAB · FORTINET ] BUILDING A
HOME LAB? Real Fortinet gear, real configs, real costs. FortiGate, FortiSwitch, FortiAP — documented from scratch.
★ The full Homelab Path — five-stage build order Fortinet on a Budget: My Stack The 1500-Byte Lie — MTU, MSS & the VPN Black Hole What Enterprise Networking Looks Like
[ SELF-HOSTING · LINUX ] SELF-HOSTING
ON LINUX? Apache, Cloudflare Tunnel, Pi-hole, Umami — this site runs on a home lab box. Here's how.
Why My Site Worked Locally But Not Publicly Ditching Google Analytics for Umami
[ CAREER · MINDSET ] EARLY IN YOUR
IT CAREER? Co-op to full time network analyst. What the job actually looks like vs what you study.
What Enterprise Networking Actually Looks Like Ironman Training Taught Me How to Study

★ WHO IS THIS GUY

░░░░░░░ ░ DD ░ ░░░░░░░ LVL 23 NET ANALYST

I'm Dylan Doyle — network analyst at Halton District School Board in Burlington, ON. BIT NET grad from Carleton and Algonquin. Two co-op summers at Halton's ISIS department, kept on full time after graduation.

I run a Fortinet home lab — FortiGate 60F, FortiSwitch 124D, FortiAP 421E — and self-host everything including this site on a Pop!_OS box running Apache2 behind a Cloudflare Tunnel.

Working toward my CCNA. Training for a full Ironman. Documenting all of it here — the labs, the certs, the mistakes, the grind.

FULL BIO ▶
[ ★ THE SHORT VERSION ] This site exists because I learn better when I write things down — and because every time I figured something out the hard way, I wished someone had documented it properly. If you're studying for CCNA, building a home lab, or trying to figure out what an IT career actually looks like in practice — you're in the right place._