Any free ***beginer*** resources?

Comments

• cosmic_slate@dmv.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  So first, what is your objective? What do you want to learn? Self-hosting is extremely open ended.

  Now if you’re wanting an avenue into learning entry-level networking, you can try finding Network+ study materials. Unfortunately I haven’t touched this in over 14 years so I don’t have any direct links, but literally any study book or guide, even if its a few years old, should help get you started.

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  • kapx132@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    my first goal is to learn how networks work, and then once i learn the basics i want to host my own matrix server.

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    • marcos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I suggest you reverse that order. If first you learn how to host your own matrix server, you’ll have a better idea of what part of “how networks work” you wan to learn.

      Or maybe you decide you want a full graduation course on how network works so you can learn all of the basics. But either way, that first half is a large endeavor.

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    • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      how networks work

      tcpipguide.com/free/index.htm and lookup terms/protocols on wikipedia as you go.

      But as others said, I think you would learn faster if you pick a specific project and try to implement it from scratch. A matrix server is a nice project, but it will have you dig into matrix-specific configuration which is not particularly relevant if you’re just trying to learn system administration and networking.

      I would start with a more “basic” project and ensure you got the fundamentals right, and document or automate (shell scripts, ansible…) all steps:

      • install a virtualization platform (hypervisor)
      • create a VM and install Debian inside it, using LVM for disk management, and a static IP address
      • practice with creating/restoring snapshots, add/remove hardware and resources (vCPUs, RAM, disk storage) from the VM
      • set up an SSH server and client using SSH keys
      • setup a firewall with some basic rules (e.g. only accept SSH connections from a specific IP address and DROP all other SSH connections, forward all HTTPS connections to another IP address…)
      • setup monitoring with a few basic rules (alert if the SSH server is down, alert if disk space or free memory is low…)
      • automate security updates
      • …

      Then you can work your way up to more complex services, lookup security hardening measures on your existing setup (as always, document or automate all steps). To give you some ideas, you can find ansible roles I wrote for these tasks here. The common role implements most of what I listed above. The monitoring role implements the monitoring part. There are a few other roles for middleware/infrastructure services (web server/reverse proxy/DNS server/…) and a few more for applications (matrix+element, gitea, jellyfin, mumble…). Start at tasks/main.yml for each role, follow the import_tasks statements from there, and reach the name for each task to get a good overview of what needs to be done, and implement it yourself from a shell in the first time. If you break your setup, restore the initial VM snapshot and start again (at this point you’ve automated everything, so it shuold not take more than a few minutes, right?) .

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    • tja@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You can take a look at MIT courseware if there is something for you

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    • sirboozebum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Matrix server?

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• Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

  Fewer Letters	More Letters
  DNS	Domain Name Service/System
  HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
  HTTPS	HTTP over SSL
  IP	Internet Protocol
  SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access
  SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
  TCP	Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP
  VPN	Virtual Private Network

  ---

  [Thread #219 for this sub, first seen 16th Oct 2023, 20:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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• cron@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Not free, but there are courses in udemy starting from 15€ for new customers. But be warned, these “basic” courses are between 15 and 25 hours of video. Network is not a topic you can teach yourself in one day.

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• adamwon@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  FWIW Coursera will generally let you take courses for free if you apply for their financial aid. It’s annoying the first time because you have to write a couple short essays but I’ve just written them once and use the same ones over and over without issue

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• SheeEttin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  TCP/IP Illustrated.

  www.isi.edu/~hussain/TEACH/…/Steven00a.pdf

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• Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I learned everything by experimenting with it. Back in the days, that was running my own local Apache for development on Ubuntu 7.10. And then I slowly started toying with different services, eventually got my own VPS, learned to firewall and lock things down. Eventually I got into VMs which got me to learn networking and how bridges work. Later on, I played with VPNs and as my needs grew the network and routing grew as well.

  You can learn from tutorials but the real learning is the hands on experience.

  VMs are free and cheap to run these days, make a VM, play with it, mess it up however you want, try to fix it, reinstall it as necessary. Try to find ways a bad actor could get to it and how to prevent it.

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