About NetKube Lab

Where the courses, the writing and the notes from real network engineering live

What this is

NetKube Lab collects courses and writing about computer networking in one place — by someone who does this for a living, and written so that a person starting from nothing can follow it.

You build things rather than watch them. Every course is worked through in a simulator, so mistakes cost nothing and there is no equipment to buy.
Some exercises have a fault planted in them for you to find, because tracking down a cause is what the job actually is when a network misbehaves — and copying an answer key never teaches it.
Each course's material lives on that course's own site. This one is the way in, so asking for a place always happens on the course page.

How this site works

The writing here follows one set of rules, and those rules are enforced by a test suite that runs before anything is published — not by good intentions alone.

Every number has to say where it came from: measured on a real machine with the commands to reproduce it, or computed with the working shown. And where something cannot be verified, the article says so plainly instead of sounding confident.
Nearly every piece carries a section collecting what the topic is usually got wrong about, because what stops people fixing a problem is rarely what they do not know — it is what they are sure of.
Thai is the source and English is the mirror. Wherever the two disagree, the Thai one is right.
No server, no accounts and nothing counting readers. How far you have read is kept in your own browser and goes nowhere else, and with JavaScript switched off every page still reads in full.
The one thing a page loads from anywhere else is the Thai typeface, from Google Fonts — which means your IP address reaches that server too. It is written down here because claiming nothing at all would not be true.

The name and the mark

The name has three parts, and the mark answers the first two.

Net — everything this site is about, from a single cable to a route across the world
Kube — the shape of the mark: a wireframe cube, its corners and the links between them
Lab — how the learning happens here: try it and look at the result, rather than memorise and believe

The mark reads two ways at once. One is a cube; the other is a single node with three links leaving it — and both readings are the same set of lines.
The largest, brightest node is the corner you are standing on; next are the three it reaches directly, and the rest are smaller because they are further off. It is a picture of where several articles here end up: a tool can only report what reaches the point where it stands. Ping, traceroute and packet capture all run into that same limit.
Those nodes are what make the mark ours. A bare wireframe cube with three lines inside it is the `box` icon Feather drew and Lucide inherited — measured, no more than two units apart on a thirty-two unit grid, with the inner lines identical. That icon is in thousands of products, so on its own the shape says only that someone reached for a stock drawing.
Lab is not in the mark; it is in the wordmark beside it. A flask next to a cube is two ideas competing for a sixteen-pixel square.
There are two palettes, light and dark, and every colour pair is checked against WCAG AA by calculation rather than by eye. The light accent once measured 4.37, which is under the threshold, and nothing about it looked wrong.
The mark is not stored as an image file. It is drawn from one set of coordinates at build time — the tab icon, the home-screen icon and the mark in the header — so they change together and none of them can be left behind.

Contact

To join a course, the button on that course's page is quickest: the request arrives tied to the Google account it came from, so it can be approved on sight. Anything else can come through here.

Email [email protected]