Maybe my path can help you. I don’t have any educational / professional background in tech, but it is my hobby. I started simple, wanting a NAS for my home. I downloaded TrueNAS and reading the docs and using a lot of YouTube videos (from multiple creators) I managed to get it up and running. Then I tried sharing but using permissions. It took me weeks to understand ACL and NFS shares. It took me a week to figure out that I need to share both parent and child dataset to access a child via NFS. I had to goggle a lot, but it was such a stupid mistake that there was no information about, so I resort to try and error.
After I had it setup I thought it would cool to install pinhole. Then I had to learn VM on trueNas, Linux server, package managers and so on. I had zero experience in Linux. I managed to install docker and portainer via a tutorial but then I learned docker compose files and it made everything easier. I destroyed and created that vm multiple times. Tried Debian, Ubuntu server, fedora server …
The pattern goes on, home lab will be about reading a lot and not afraid to try and break stuff. It is better to try when you don’t have a lot of services. Always backup your vm, if something breaks, nuke it and start from the backup.
Keep it a piece each time. Don’t try to setup all at once. Have an idea about the end state but solve a small problem at time. They say the best engineers are the ones that are able to break complex problems in really small ones.
Doing that I have a vm on true nas running more than 20 containers, a redundant pinhole on a separated server, everything accessible via VPN.
Now I’m learning about podman and kubernetes, probably I will spin a second vm, try to migrate what I have a nuke docker. It never ends while you are curious.
Maybe my path can help you. I don’t have any educational / professional background in tech, but it is my hobby. I started simple, wanting a NAS for my home. I downloaded TrueNAS and reading the docs and using a lot of YouTube videos (from multiple creators) I managed to get it up and running. Then I tried sharing but using permissions. It took me weeks to understand ACL and NFS shares. It took me a week to figure out that I need to share both parent and child dataset to access a child via NFS. I had to goggle a lot, but it was such a stupid mistake that there was no information about, so I resort to try and error. After I had it setup I thought it would cool to install pinhole. Then I had to learn VM on trueNas, Linux server, package managers and so on. I had zero experience in Linux. I managed to install docker and portainer via a tutorial but then I learned docker compose files and it made everything easier. I destroyed and created that vm multiple times. Tried Debian, Ubuntu server, fedora server … The pattern goes on, home lab will be about reading a lot and not afraid to try and break stuff. It is better to try when you don’t have a lot of services. Always backup your vm, if something breaks, nuke it and start from the backup. Keep it a piece each time. Don’t try to setup all at once. Have an idea about the end state but solve a small problem at time. They say the best engineers are the ones that are able to break complex problems in really small ones. Doing that I have a vm on true nas running more than 20 containers, a redundant pinhole on a separated server, everything accessible via VPN.
Now I’m learning about podman and kubernetes, probably I will spin a second vm, try to migrate what I have a nuke docker. It never ends while you are curious.