SPARKS Internship

End-to-end hands-on syllabus — Core networking, virtualization, cloud, security, and monitoring.

20-day program (Days 1–13 shown)

WEEK 1 — CORE NETWORKING & VIRTUALIZATION FOUNDATIONS

Days 1 — 5

Day 1 — Linux Access & Environment Setup

  • SSH fundamentals (key-based login, privilege separation)
  • Host access via SSH
  • VM provisioning (VirtualBox or KVM/QEMU)
  • Network config: static & dynamic IP
  • Basic Linux tools: netstat, ss, ip, nmcli, systemctl

Day 2 — Secure Remote Access

  • WireGuard site-to-site VPN setup
  • Install Windows VM + Ubuntu Core
  • Install Chrome on Ubuntu Core via Snap
  • Remote SSH using Tailscale mesh VPN
  • Cross-VM connectivity verification

Day 3 — DNS and Containerization Basics

  • DNS lookup, records, resolution labs using Bind9 and dig
  • Pod-based addressing and name resolution
  • Docker + LXC installation
  • Build 3 Docker containers and interconnect
  • docker-compose orchestration basics

Day 4 — Container OS and Management

  • Install Cosmos OS (LXC) environment
  • Deploy and manage containers via Portainer web UI
  • Configure container networking and persistent volumes

Day 5 — Proxies & Filtering

  • Forward, reverse, and auth proxies with Squid + Nginx
  • Basic load balancer (HAProxy / Nginx)
  • Deploy Pi-hole for DNS filtering and policies
  • Traffic inspection labs

WEEK 2 — NETWORK SECURITY & EDGE CONNECTIVITY

Days 6 — 10

Day 6 — Firewalls and Network Rules

  • Install pfSense and OPNsense virtual firewalls
  • Configure NAT, ACLs, and stateful rules
  • Route and filter between internal/external segments

Day 7 — Secure Access Overlay Networks

  • Deep dive: Tailscale, NetBird, Twingate
  • Compare ZTNA vs. traditional VPN
  • Build overlay network and access policies

Day 8 — Cloud Networking (AWS)

  • AWS EC2 free-tier instance setup
  • Docker installation on EC2
  • Deploy network management containers (Portainer, Netdata)
  • Remote management via Tailscale/VPN tunnel

Day 9 — Cloud Networking (Azure)

  • Azure VM provisioning
  • Mirror AWS tasks: Docker + Portainer + remote access
  • Compare VPC vs. VNet
  • Cloud-to-cloud peering overview

Day 10 — Orchestration Platform

  • Install Cloudify (open-source) on Hostinger or local server
  • Manage multi-cloud deployments
  • Create basic topology and deployment blueprint

WEEK 3 — NETWORK OPERATIONS & CYBERSECURITY

Days 11 — 13

Day 11 — NOC Monitoring

  • Deploy Prometheus, Grafana, and Netdata
  • SNMP and system metrics collection
  • Live dashboards for latency, CPU, and link health
  • Alerting and threshold rules

Day 12 — SOC Monitoring

  • Deploy ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) or Wazuh
  • Centralize logs from firewalls, proxies, servers
  • Security event correlation and detection rules

Day 13 — ZTNA Labs

Four ZTNA use cases implemented with Tailscale ACLs + NetBird policies

  1. User-based access to internal app
  2. Device trust with certificate authentication
  3. Cloud resource restriction via identity provider
  4. Access auditing and revocation