I’ve been slowly working my way though a list of skills to learn, both to put on my resume and as personal growth. Networking is the next thing on this list. I am not sure what I am looking for, but I want to start another project. I have built many a personal computer, but the world of networking is a pretty foreign concept to me.
I have experience with building computers and a minor glance at the network-side of things. I’ve set up a Pi-Hole or two and set a basic CUPS server up on a RPi0w, but beyond that, I have no idea what I’m doing, or even what the possibilities are. I just see posts like this and think that it’s a pretty cool hardware project.
Is there any resources you recommend to start learning, maybe what the hardware does? From my outsider’s perspective, I see a lot of people’s racks have at least a router, switch, and firewall, along with various other machines.
E: thank you all for the suggestions! I’ll have to take some time to figure out what to do first
I would suggest more learn by doing approach. Learning OSI model etc is nice, but it is quite jargon :)
Use some old PC as a server, and get some network cards into it, and use it as firewall/router. Route your home network/NAT/DNS/DCHP through it. Raspberry Pi’s are nice, but their hw is still bit limited.
OPNSense is quite nice and easy free and open source firewall/router solution.
If you want to add bit of flexibility, you can use some virtualization platform like VMware in to the machine, so that you can run OPNSense in it, with some other virtual servers.
Then when you get things working, you can start looking in to VLAN’s, because they are quite important part of enterprise networking. Most cheap switches nowadays support VLAN’s out of the box.