Homelab

My active passiv pihole cluster helped me to understand clusters.

I learned how to use docker containers by setting up my minecraft server.

My homeassistant VM and OPN sense test VM helped me to understand hardware passthrough.

By setting up wireguard i learned how routing works.

I was experimenting with GPOs in a test active directory running completely in VMs. That way i learned some basic stuff about active directory.

I really recommend setting up a proxmox server or something similar for experimenting.

Having users. It helped me understand users are a PITA. ;).

1. Linux/server os's with command line administration

2. Hypervisor VMs and Containers

3. Setting up external access to a service via a reverse proxy and a FQDN.

4. Pihole, understanding DNS and the different effects it has on things

5. VLANs for different devices to stop things accessing the internet or putting guests on a different network.

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.

My test setup for an enterprise DAM helped me to better understand Active Directory, ADFS, SAML and mixed OS environments and the challenges.

If it is to easy you are missing a firewall

I learned Oracle by setting up bunches of Oracle VMs, doing horrible things to them, getting rid of the bodies, and starting over. Their sacrifices have helped me be a competent entry-level Oracle DBA. I’m learning Python on a VM configured with Eclipse and another VM with Jupyter. I’m actually a SQL Server DBA, and we don’t have much of a SQL Server test environment where I work. I test what I can in VMs in my homelab. Flashed a consumer router with OpenWRT and learned tons about networking, and confirmed why I never aspired to be a network engineer LOL. Trying to access my homelab remotely taught me a lot more about information security. Wanting to know what’s going on with my infrastructure (InfluxDB+prometheus+Grafana) has given me greater insight into SRE.