I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.
I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.
I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)
Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.
Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.
Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!
Most of my time in my sysadmin work is sitting there staring at the screen reading error logs about why some new product isn’t working.
make sure you ACTUALLY have a solid grasp of networking. dig into the osi model or the 3 layer dod model. Go further than “yup. encapsulation. got it”. Look at the actual headers in layer 2 and layer 3. Figure out how packets get routed and how frames get forwarded. Look at how NAT actually mangles packets.
Understanding hos the traffic flows will make troubleshooting much easier.