The scope of my job has opened a bit to now include IT. I work on a ship which runs a small network, with server and firewall, where about 100 people also connect with personal laptops/phones etc. The network is remotely managed from ashore via sat link, though I’m the one on board to sort things out when things go wrong.
I need a bit of training to get me up to speed with how to fault find. My level of knowledge is pretty basic (I know what a MAC address and IP address is and know dynamic IP addresses are issued to each device from the firewall. That’s about the lot!)

Does anyone know of any courses, perhaps distance learning or flexi-part time which could teach me the basics?

Who is the manufacturer of the equipment? e.g. Cisco, Huawei etc.

If the former there are lots of courses and books about.

You could try getting a certification – maybe your employer would pay?

https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/community/certifications/ccent

How often does something go wrong?
Beyond turning kit on and off what do you expect to be able to do afloat? (I assume you aren’t going to have a heap of spares to swap out).

I’m no expert but I’d start just by mapping out what you have and understanding how it all connects etc, and keeping a record of all the configuration/admin passwords for each element and their settings so if you need to do a hard reset / replacement you can quickly reconfigure. e.g. the firewall doesn’t issue IP addresses, a DHCP server does – although it might live in the same box as the firewall. IF the firewall and DHCP server etc are Linux based you’ll find plenty of reading on line (or in books) on basic Linux server management. Once you’ve worked out what the DHCP server, gateway, wireless access point, etc are then you might want to make sure you understand subnet masks. After that TCP ports etc and port forwarding, network address translation etc. And if you are feeling good at that point then routing tables.

Once you’ve read about those and understood how they are set up and controlled on your network without buggering up the connection for everyone then you probably have a lot of stuff covered! 99% of your support questions will probably be for stupid things like not being able to type Pa55w0rd correctly!

This any use?

http://www.saylor.org/courses/cs402/

I’ve not done the course, but it’s free… Might be a bit theoretical, but IME that’s not a bad thing, it’s never a bad idea to get a solid understanding of the fundamentals.

Probably worth looking at some of the Comptia courses, something along the lines of a Network + if you’re already confident with hardware.

Network+ just buy the book, if it is too hard do the A+ first

Many thanks for the input. That Saylor.org looks quite good. Thanks for the other suggestions too. What am I expected to do other than remember logins & reboots? As an example, someone plugged a home WIFI router which started issuing IP addresses as it was set up as a DHCP server, grinding the network to a stop. Thankfully there’s someone else on board who knew how to trace it, hack into it and turn off the DHCP server status. Last week I didn’t even know what a DHCP server was… Bring on the learning curve!

Yup go CompTIA – A+, Network+

As an example, someone plugged a home WIFI router which started issuing IP addresses as it was set up as a DHCP server, grinding the network to a stop. Thankfully there’s someone else on board who knew how to trace it, hack into it and turn off the DHCP server status.

That happens in even supposedly secure corporate networks. Trouble is, people are involved at some point 🙂 – you could have just unplugged it though 🙂

Yup go CompTIA – A+, Network+

As an example, someone plugged a home WIFI router which started issuing IP addresses as it was set up as a DHCP server, grinding the network to a stop. Thankfully there’s someone else on board who knew how to trace it, hack into it and turn off the DHCP server status.

That happens in even supposedly secure corporate networks. Trouble is, people are involved at some point 🙂 – you could have just unplugged it though 🙂