ss2chef
You don't research and study by only hunting and pecking for the unknown.
Perhaps you enjoy the wild goose chase..?
I know many researchers in many fields of study.
Not may go freeloading around other labs hoping to stumble on something new or different.
Control is important to experimentation.
First, chill out. This isn't a "white hat's only" forum, so get off the soapbox. People learn different things in different ways. Asking questions and reading manuals didn't do a damn thing for me, because I needed hands on experience. I couldn't grasp how TCP/IP worked until I tried my own packets. I couldn't understand the concept of OS fingerprinting until I sat down and tried it. If he wants to learn (and may learn best for him) by trying it on legitiment networks that others have allowed him to test on, then let him do so without your holier than thou speach.

The thing is, if you know what you have in your own fridge, you will be in a much better position to identify what is in anothers...To use your "analogy".
This simply isn't true. As I said above, some people can't for the life of them grasp a manual or howto book, but once they get into that refrigerator and start tearing it apart, that's how they learn.

Some of the most brilliant hackers of our time came not from endless supplies of manuals, but from removing that phone handset and seeing what made it tick. Don't critisize his way of thinking.

If you really know your stuff, the chance of running into the unknown is far less..IMO
There will always be unknown, and text books certainly won't cover what you need. It's like a sage versus a scholar. A scholar can tell you what he has read about it, a sage can tell you about it first hand.

soma
I encourage you soma to learn in the way you feel best. If that means reading book after book, then go for it. If that means getting friends to setup machines for you, then go for it. Do what works for -you-, and not how others tell you to learn. I think your idea of how to gain knowledge and experience on the security world is going to be very effective for you and I completely understand where you are coming from.

So, listen to the people above who offered links on wargaming with others, and look into having one of your friends setup a machine for you. In the end, having you install some random OS is still going to be Okay. Because the footprinting of a machine to learn it's OS version is a peice of cake, as you will come to learn, and that shouldn't stop you from merely skipping that first part of a hack of identifying an OS... when you can already know the OS but learn the intriciate nature and mechanics of that OS as you dig into it.

If you have any questions, let me know. It's hard to find people who aren't "anti anything but white hat" sometimes