Comment on Misadventures with my first server (On a old laptop) #1
Lenny@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Man, this is what I fear trying to get into homelab’ing. I’m just so naive to networking I’m afraid I’ll break everything. The most I’ve ever accomplished was Plex on my PC, Plex app elsewhere and PC has to have Plex running to work. That and I built a NAS (when really I just wish it was a DAS I could tether to multiple PC’s at once), and I barely made it though tutorials to get that working.
I feel like I need to buy a textbook because I’m so clueless on the basics I can’t even get started, since almost any tutorial online assumes you know the bare bones basics. Like I literally don’t know what DHCP is, how it works, or even what it stands for.
At the very least your post has inspired me to try to start trying again. Maybe there’s a textbook I can pick up to start learning this super basic groundwork, or maybe a course online.
Fermiverse@feddit.de 9 months ago
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol ) is a communication protocol that is used to coordinate a network via a server. The server in most home cases is your internet router. It coordinates the network.
Think of your network as a town with streets, every street has a unique name aka network address. So when a new device gets into the town it gets a unique address in a certain format, when requested by the clients. Mostly IPv4 i.e. 192.168.178.20.
Second there are ports. Ports are the house numbers of the streets. So if two devices use the same IP they still can be differentiated by using different ports. To address a specific port you write it behind the IP, in our example 192.168.178.20:80. So we use port 80.
To come back to the beginning the router coordinates the IP addresses and the ports from your internal network via DHCP and makes sure every device is accessible and no doubles.
There is a lot more but very briefly this is it.
Lenny@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Thank you 🙏🏻 this is a great ELI5 for my smooth brain!
PlexSheep@feddit.de 9 months ago
If I remember correctly from my CCNA, it is also responsible for configuring routes from one network to another, because configuring static routes in routers is not fun.
Fermiverse@feddit.de 9 months ago
You are correct, there is a lot more to dive in like NAT, IPv6, static or dynamic address, UPnP, MAC address, subnet space etc.
But I wanted to keep it simple.