The hardest part of configuring the services you list is not the networking, but all the non-networking topics you need to be familiar with: zone file syntax; cipher suite selection; OS-specific security policy and permissions models; PKI administration; PXE ROM peculiarities, etc.

Once you're confident with arp, addressing/subnetting, routing tables, and a few other tools like netstat and `dig` you can quickly eliminate the network as the cause of the issue and focus on grokking the application itself.