Mission Institute of Technology

The internet makes more sense when you can explore it.

Learn networking from first principles. Interactive lessons show you what the network does, playable experiments let you poke at it, and hands-on Linux labs prove it on a real machine.

Start the networking course What's in the course

Free. No account. Your progress stays in this browser.

  1. DNSWhat is cats.com? A resolver walks root, .com and cats.com's own server: 203.0.113.10.
  2. RouteThat address is outside your home network, so the packet goes to the router.
  3. ARPWho has 192.168.1.1? The router answers with its hardware (MAC) address.
  4. RouterOne off the TTL, your private address swapped for the public one (NAT).
  5. TCPSYN, SYN-ACK, ACK. A connection to cats.com, port 80.
  6. HTTPGET / and GET /cat.png. 200 OK, twice. The browser draws one cat.
What your computer does after you press Enter Play it: the cats.com adventure
01 · The course

How Networks Work

Start at the cable in your own house and work outward. In every lesson you predict what the network will do, drive it yourself, break it on purpose, and then check it against real output from a Linux machine. Written for people starting out, and precise enough for a working network engineer.

World 1 · 6 lessons available · about 36 minutes

Start Lesson 1-1 See the whole course
  1. 1-1Five Jobs Before a Cat6 min
  2. 1-2Who Lives on Your Street?6 min
  3. 1-3Slice the Pizza6 min
  4. 1-4The Envelope Swap6 min
  5. 1-5Who Has 192.168.1.1?6 min
  6. 1-6The Switch Learns6 min

Next in the course: World 2, The Web Request (routing, NAT, TCP, DNS, HTTP and TLS) and World 3, The Internet (troubleshooting, firewalls, BGP). They are being written; their interactive tools already work in Labs & Tools.

02 · How you learn here

Understand. Practice. Build. Prove.

Not every lesson needs all four, but every idea here gets at least two of them. You never have to take a protocol on faith.

  1. Understand

    A short story, a cartoon, one sentence. Then you predict what happens before you see it.

    The course

  2. Practice

    Drive the protocol yourself in a browser sandbox. Change a prefix, drop a packet, watch it fail.

    Interactive tools

  3. Build

    Real Linux, real packets. Each lab builds a small network on your machine and captures what it does.

    Linux labs

  4. Prove

    Answer from evidence, not memory. Review what you cleared and share a page that shows it.

    Review and proof
MT Arcade Kulshan // Home LANRide the packet
through the clouds. 2 gamesPress start
03 · The Arcade

Games where the rules are the real rules

Every packet in these games obeys the same rules a real network does. Play first, ask questions after.

Visit the Arcade

04 · Labs & Tools

Use them with the course, or on their own

Every lab and tool stands alone. Open one when you need to see a single idea work.

7

Linux labs

Build small networks with real kernel state on Ubuntu or WSL2, and capture the packets as proof.

 17

Interactive tools

Subnets, ARP, switching, routing, NAT, TCP, DNS, TLS, firewalls and BGP, each one a sandbox.

 4

Real-world checks

Look at the actual internet: your public address, live DNS lookups and how fast real resolvers answer.

A small, independent school
in Mission, BC.

I'm a network engineer in Mission, BC, building the course I wished I'd had. Real protocols, plain HTML, no account, no ads.

Why Mission Tech exists