What free learning resources do you recommend for learning networking skills and concepts?
There are free books, and sites to encourage learning how to program in different languages, but I was wondering what resources people in this forum would recommend so that my son and I could learn more about networking and securing your home lab network. We are enjoying our home lab that started out with mostly used hardware people were throwing away. Now with the recent purchase of a Raspberry Pi 5 we have been able to move all of our home lab to a RPi 5, RPi4, and RPi 3. We have Openwrt running on a Zimaboard (2gb, 1st gen model) which has been great too. Everything is connected by a simple 1GB switch, and our wireless is handled with a single UniFi AP located in the center of our house. We two external hard drives hooked to the RPi 5 that serve as our file storage or our Syncthing “source of truth” with the 2nd drive receiving daily back ups from the main data drive. We also have an RPi 1 with an external hard drive running 3 hours away as our “cloud” backup receiving the same daily back up from the main data drive as the back up drive using BORG as our backup software.
We are having fun, but we both want to add to our hobby by learning more about networking and networking concepts in the hopes that we can do the following:
Properly set up vlans that we could move our IoT devices or perhaps all of our Home Assistant automation and devices to.
Examine the traffic leaving our network and coming into our network to ensure that we have our firewall blocking things properly.
Learn more about securing our home lab too.
If you know of some great free resources that we could use to learn more to make us more knowledgeable in our home lab hobby that would be great.
I don’t know if anything straight forward like that. YouTube is a great resource. Tom has quite a few videos on securing networks and setting up VLAN’s on pfsense and UniFi. You can translate the concepts to openwrt.
I’d also recommend using tools like wireshark to inspect traffic and packets. This is a great tool to learn when troubleshooting networks.
I’d also recommend getting a layer 2 switch to configure your VLAN’s .
I would love a downloadable book or a ebook published on a website, that we can work through over time. I appreciate Tom’s videos and other great videos on YouTube, but I struggle to learn new skills through that medium. I often enjoy watching them for “entertainment” or to get new ideas of things to explore in more detail and learn through online classes, books, or learning websites. But your encouragement to check out Tom’s videos for this purpose is a great idea, I could probably put a few into a play list and work through them more for learning purposes.
I appreciated your suggestion of getting a “managed switch” for setting up VLAN’s. I think that I was thinking in correctly that you would set up the VLAN at the Firewall Router, but when I looked at managed switches I noticed that they have VLAN’s as a prominent part of the interface, so I’m guessing that a managed switch is also a necessary part of the set up that we would need to set up VLANS since our openwrt router doesn’t have multiple ports on it for the local LAN.
It’s not free, but Michael Lucas very recently released a second edition of his Networking for Sysadmins book. I very much enjoy his writing style, so I’d recommend anything he writes.