About Mission Tech
A small school for understanding how things actually work.
Mission Institute of Technology, Mission Tech for short, teaches networking from first principles. It is independent, free to use, and built by one network engineer in Mission, BC.
Why it exists
Networking sits under every system you will ever run, and it is usually taught as a list of things to memorize. Textbooks describe packet flows in paragraphs. Certifications cost a lot. Videos show slides. Very little of it lets you touch the thing.
Mission Tech exists to close that gap: to let you type an address and watch 32 bits light up, send an ARP request and see it reach every port, and then prove the same thing on a real Linux machine.
How it teaches
Systems before commands. You learn what the network is doing and why, so the commands become obvious instead of something to memorize.
Predict, then observe. Each lesson asks you to guess first. Being wrong in a safe place is how the right model sticks.
Real evidence. Every claim in the course can be checked: real header fields, real port numbers, real output from a real Linux machine.
Understand, practice, build, prove. Interactive lessons, browser tools to experiment with, Linux labs to build it for real, and a proof page to show what you can do. The Arcade is there for the days you'd rather play.
Who builds it
I'm a network engineer who spent years in cloud infrastructure. I failed the CCNA twice before I ever touched a production BGP table. I left a comfortable job because I believed this was worth building, and I work from Mission, BC, a small town east of Vancouver with mountains and quiet.
Everything here is built by one person: the course, the tools, the labs, the arcade games and the site. No team, no investors, no ads. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
What you can count on
- Free, no account. If you have a browser, you have access. Your progress stays in that browser; you can save it to a file and move it.
- No ads, no cookies. The course keeps anonymous counts of how many people reach each part of a lesson, and of "this confused me" taps, so confusing lessons get fixed. Nothing identifies you, and browsers that send Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control are never counted.
- Honest about the outside world. A few tools look at the real internet, such as a live DNS lookup or your public address. Each one says what it contacts before you run it.
- Independent means specific. Mission Tech is not accredited and claims no certification authority or institutional affiliation. The AWS practice sets are exam practice, kept separate from the networking course.