While this post is a bit of a generic rant, I do know what I’m trying to do, and the issue is that as soon as you go into anything slightly more complex than setting up a VPN, you’ll be bombarded with a thousand words that barely mean anything, everyone and their mother has a different opinion on what’s optimal, minimal and desired and to top all of that, most resources out there focus on making you understand what things are rather than how to set it up.

My issue and what I was ranting is why is most shit on the internet so unhelpful, hoping to find someone who’s had a similar struggle and learn how to get better. And I’ve succeeded, many people have given me useful advice.

I never said anything remotely as vague as “computers are hard” I think my post clearly states my issue is with resources being unhelpful for complete beginners

It comes with experience I guess, I’ve got a bad habit of researching to the core and many times have a hard time grasping things like containers without understanding how it’s setup technically. Sometimes I find a decent explanation, but specially for libraries that do “magic” I gotta go diving into the source to understand what’s going on, else I have trouble understanding what I am doing and what I should be doing.

Which makes it so hard because networking is very low level and I’m very unfamiliar with this environment

Well, you’ve proven my point. In order to know how to setup an authoritative DNS server I need to read the docs for bind. But in order to know bind is the answer to my problem I need to read articles and blogs. There is no way to go from Authoritative DNS server to bind without reading some more on the internet in blogs and whatnot.

Once I know about bind, I can read it’s docs to set it up or to figure out if it’s the right thing for me, but I need to know about it first.

I only ever use something other than the docs when I’m either looking for something more specific than the docs, the docs suck or I can’t find it in the docs. Really not against reading through them at all.

But with a lot of programs that’s also an issue cause a lot of docs just expect you to be familiar with that area of knowledge (at least with some libraries I work with such as Spring in Java, which assumes constantly you know about HTTP and APIs when explaining how to set an HTTP API with Spring. Not saying it’s bad, you probably need that background knowledge anyway, and the doc writers cannot be bothered to bake it into the docs, but it gives people who are completely clueless like me more and more homework in a snowball that becomes quickly unmanageable)

When I say at a theoretical level I mean I’m familiar with it from University lectures and reading about what it is, but it is true I’ve never actually tweaked my networking in a practical sense enough to be familiar with it, which is exactly why I want to get into self-hosting.

As for the docs, I read them, I truly do. But docs are not where you find how to do something, is where you find how to implement it. By this I mean, if I wanna setup an authoritative DNS server, I need to find how I set one up. Once I know what software I need to use, I can read the docs to figure out how to wield said software. Just stuck on the step before being able to dive into the docs (or stuck on having too many docs to read, no middle ground)

I’ve read that repo a million times! My self-hosting needs are more esoteric and I mostly play around with it. I’ve no need for media services or 90% of what that repo offers yet!

I mostly want to end up self-hosting my own apps, but I need some foundational knowledge

I wish I could afford a Pi. Would be so cool. Unfortunately I’m stuck with my gaming PC from 6 years ago that I recently updated from. Much more powerful hardware but I can’t just swap out the drive or not worry about power usage sadly haha.

Still, I’ve had to reinstall the OS about 8 times last year alone haha, but we’re still learning (most because I forgot the password tbh haha

I seriously thought it was a product, rather than software tbf. The name always sounded so “corporate” I never considered it.

I definitely know more about the theory than the practice. I’m clueless as to what my options even are so I can’t argue with that.

But I did know about the Linux “inheritance” of distros if you wanna call it that, and I’m fully aware of what that entails.

Just honestly didn’t look at it twice cause I thought “there must be an FOSS option” without realizing what PiHole really is. Just a case of prejudice biting me in the ass I guess.

Honestly, I get they’re trying to be educational for beginners way more clueless than me. But after two years of an IT degree I know some stuff, and the sheer amount of internet text I’ve read just to find absolutely nothing new and no solution even though the title is exactly my problem is unreal

For me, I have that as the 4th result, after some Reddit and IBM which probably would’ve discouraged me from continuing my search. I’d have to read on it.

Also, TIL PiHole doesn’t necessarily need to run on a Raspberry Pi. I guess assumptions really do come back to bite me in the ass haha

Thanks for the suggestions! The algorithms keep feeding me people who just explain what stuff is and it drives me nuts. You wouldn’t believe the amount of videos, articles and blogs I’ve seen on setting up a DNS server just for it to be about either a cache or an explanation of how it works. I’ll look into these later!

I actually hate GPT, dislike it’s answers and find myself knowing better than it most times.

I’ve been trying to setup a DNS server to create my own domains internally within my VPN but I keep finding info on how DNS servers work, and how to make a records on registrars, but nothing on what I actually need to install and run to have my own DNS for example. Same thing goes for many other services, but that’s the one bugging me for the longest time because it should be so simple.

I’ve found plenty of tutorials on how to make a cache DNS, just not an authoritative name server btw, and I’ve searched for both DNS and name server to no avail. If it was Linux I’d write some custom rules in my hostfiles and be done with it, but it’s so much harder to do on Windows and that’s my daily use OS for now…

It should, in theory, only the binaries should be different so all config/media should work.