What would you recommend to a guy whose just getting started out and pursuing his trifecta?
1st: Virtualization
2nd: Firewalls and networking
3rd: Containers, Docker, (Podman) and LXC, (Incus)
4th: All the above leads onto Hypervisors
5th: Which leads you to Kubernetes
The first three require minimal hardware. Once you’ve got the hang of the them, it’s time to get serious with a dedicated machine with greater hardware resources to run a Hypervisor.
Kubernetes, all that built in redundancy makes it hungry beast. Enough to get you looking for one or more those big old servers that homelabers love.
I had to upvote this because I like the added “progression path analysis” given. Everything checks out so far from my personal experience.
However I have not yet delved into kubernetes yet.
Could the poster of this reply elaborate (briefly is fine) what some advantages are with Kubrn8s? You mention redundancy. From my completely inadequate understanding of kuber, you can cluster together the resources of different individual systems? Like how truenas can use all the storage of different sized drives to form one pool that can be managed as 1 resource? This of course would just be an example of what it does in concept?
So theoretically, one can sort of network a cluster of old PC’s to make a really decent, redundant “server” that shares the workload?
Hop over to the Youtube channel “Jim’s Garage”. Awesome detailed tutorial series for Kubernetes. If your brain cells have been enjoying the quiet life, it’s over, because boot camp is here. It tough going, but it’s worth it.
This. Honestly has helped grow my skills across a lot of disciplines that has been a great strength to my IT/Cyber career.
my video game bot farm gave me desire and the need to learn… 1.programming. 2.database administration, 100s of bots need a database. 3.advanced home server deployments and virtualization, 100s of bots need hardware. 4. logging, you cant observe 100s of bots you need to log their activity and establish and observe metrics. etc… I could keep going but after this I started my career as a mainframe programmer, because I had like 70ish percent of the skills I needed.
set up dedicated game servers to share with friends. Especially on some hyperviso.
I think setting up active directory domain controller with all the DHCP/DNS and group policies is a number one thing to do, if you don’t know how to do that.
Another thing would be running a Linux server and have a website. Learn how apache and Nginx works. And how to use them together.
It also helped to understand networking and virtual networking from non Cisco perspectives. I have a ccna and net+ and setting up opensense+pihole with network services was very weird, it felt completely different compared to ccna and net+ studies.
Well and of course having experience with virtualization. Learning different types of virtual storage and just in general how virtualization works.
The last thing is options but it is something that I decided to do, that can help you with networking(however there are other things you could set up that would be more useful). I would set up the gns3 server. This would help you with networking, especially if you are trying to study for network certs after ccna. But like I said, there are other projects that you can set up, that will be way more useful as a beginner.
Any chance you have a recommendation for a directory application that can be used to manage Linux, Mac, and windows?
Gonna echo some of the other replies on what I’ve used at home that’s helped me out.
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Media - Used Windows Media Center on Windows XP/7 to start with > XBMC/Kodi > Plex - on several different machines
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Networking - First wireless router was a Netgear N750, and it was great until the wife spilled some water on it > Netgear Nighthawk R7000 > Ubiquiti Edgerouter ER-X and UAP-AC-LR Access Point > still using the ER-X router but got a U6-Lite AP and then an Engenius controller and ECS-357 AP > ER-X and Aruba AP315/325 converted to be IAP models.
Got a Meraki MS120-8LP switch for POE for my APs. Ended up getting a bunch of Cisco switches and routers of different models to use at home from my current job. Still haven’t setup a working lab with those yet.
- Compute - This has been the most recent developments due to getting disposal mini desktops from work. Currently have a 3 node Proxmox cluster with 2 Windows server 2022 eval vms. One is a domain controller and the other is going to be setup for MECM(new acronym for SCCM).
I reckon that’s it for now.
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Hypervisor cluster, K8s Cluster, routed Vlans. Learn a lot of IT things building clusters and lot of networking things building out a routed vlan network. Before that just hosting websites, network shares, email, setting up postfix/sendmail running DNS servers. The first stepping stone for me was running a hypervisor so I could build the rest of the things in there.
vlan
k8 cluster.
hpc cluster simulation
GPU cluster simulation
proxmox-/vmware install and management.
building general networking and solving mid level networking issues.Truenas/Linux Proxmox/Virtualization Docker/Containerization/Portainer Traefik/Reverse Proxy/SSL Certificates PiHole/DNS
I’m going into my 2nd year self-hosting and home-labbing. i learned all of these skills from watching TechnoTim, DBTech, Network Chuck, Raid Owl, Christian Lempa, Level1Techs, Learn Linux TV, Awesome Open Source, Craft Computing, and Jeff Gerling. These guys are awesome i highly recommend them.
Running my own vmware server
Configuring guest network
Multiple vlans
Configuring tagging on switches for said vlans
Installing Linux on a VM and taking the plunge to learn it.
I have multiple things I tested and learned.
Firstly an opnSense firewall.
An Active Directory (aka setting up a Domain Controller with DNS etc) with a test client, DHCP failover (active passive)
When you have an AD (=Active Directory) you should try to set up an Exchange server, making mail flow rules etc. maybe a cluster
Docker
Reverse Proxy
And last but not least setting up Vlans -> I have a basic understanding and know how it works (and should be set up) but sadly haven’t actually configured it here at home
And virtualizing things and get some hands-on experience with VMware/Hyper-V/Proxmox/QEMU etc.
That are the things I have learned and improved my skills with at home -> At work we have no opnSense firewalls, but for learning setting up pfSense, opnSense or using an old firewall (regardless of the manufacturer) helps understanding access rules, NAT PAT etc.
Absolutely nothing has been as helpful in understanding how the internet works, as setting up and actually using BGP. An asn and a /40 for ipv6 can be had for almost nothing as a one time fee if you go through a LIR. Ipv4 is very expensive to buy but renting a /24 can be had for around $100 a month. And then you’re ready to start peering over tunnels or you can get VPSes that support it or ask your ISP (usually only on higher end business connections).
Trying to setup Nextcloud calling on docker 🥹
V
VMware vSAN cluster, ceph cluster, building HA for different services, containers, k8s cluster. The list goes on.
Setting up a small website hosted locally helped me understand the whole stack so much better. Roles / permissions / firewall rules / ports/ webservers / appservers / devops / daemons / docker / DNS and a bunch more