Gonna echo some of the other replies on what I’ve used at home that’s helped me out.

1. Media - Used Windows Media Center on Windows XP/7 to start with > XBMC/Kodi > Plex - on several different machines

2. 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.

3. 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.

1. Build your own router, segment your network. I suggest OpenWRT. Openwrt is less stream lined, which means you learn more. You’ll learn trunking, VLANs, sub netting, DNS. Do it all through CLI.

2. Reverse proxy, internal and external. Use Traefik or caddy.

3. Encryption keys. Seems simple. But learn and master ssh keys. The Internet works by communicating from point A to point B. And keys help encrypt the traffic. You should be able to type “ssh hostname” to get into any server you want access to, without the need for a password. Bonus points for finding a secure way to set cronjobs to automatically cycle keys, for security practice.

4. Docker machine. Master docker. Learn docker compose. Everything CLI.

5. Proxmox. Put everything on a VM or container. Create a nas, for storage for your VMs. Bonus if it’s strong enough to run many VMs, you can use to host a instance of any software that you are trying to learn. I for I stance am loading windows server 2022 and multiple windows 10 and 11 instances that I can control.

Do everything through CLI. Take notes on what you did (you won’t remember, it’s ok, no one remembers). Practice documentation.

Setting up a full k8s cluster (vanilla k8s, not k3s etc.) and running most of my self-hosted apps in that cluster caused me a lot of headaches but also got me an immense amount of knowledge and experience.

setting up a pfSense router is cool.

you can use docker to run some local services and give them their own domain names with pfsense

if you want to progress further, you can use traefik to give docker/kubernetes services hostnames and get a cloudflare certificate to enable https on everything

A Pfsense/opnsense VM taught me how networking works. Before I set it up, all I knew about was port forwarding. I learned about firewall rules, LAN and WAN, VLANs, VPNs, DNS, Dynamic DNS, reverse proxies, bufferbloat, DHCP, etc.

I’m also learning how to make my own CI/CD pipelines with self hosted GitHub Actions as well as dockerizing applications.

Setting up my own OPNsense router, setting up my own mail server (testing in homelab, then moved to DC as production), Univention Corporate Server as active directory for centralized authentication.