Getting Started in Home Networking

Sorry, typo, hass.io seems like a good, easy way into home assistant

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Very interesting. I’ll have to bookmark that page for later reading !!!

For those interested:

10 Networking Guides for SysAdmins from Redhat

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For those wishing to learn more about networking, here is a free network simulator that allows you to build and configure virtual switches, routers, etc.

GNS3

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Can I be the first here to say: THANKS A MILLION for everyone’s efforts!!!

I have been wanting to setup a home/small office network, like forever, but everything I found (info) is terribly outdated, incomplete, incoherent, and just impossible to get through without a bunch of cross referencing… most of all something always goes wrong and it gets so frustrating I give up, and I am not an easy quitter. Most of all nothing seems to start at the very beginning, but rather in the thick of it, after one already has a network up and running. “How to do this” and “how to do that” doesn’t work when you don’t know what “This” and “That” are, and as many things in computing, things are not always what their name, terminology eludes to.

One of the biggest problems is that there is no good way to even find info for lack of knowing all of the software’s, methods and related terminology, so even finding the right info is often hours or even days of chasing info on the wrong track! The only way I can see getting it done would be the “This is what I need my network for, and what I want it to do” approach, with someone holding my hand throughout, and starting from the very beginning, because so far I have yet to get two boxes to see each other, which should be simple, but just has never happened, no matter what I have tried!

I have many skills and a great education, have been computing since the late 70’s, but as the guy with the soldering iron. I have always been a power user, but the whole programming thing, coding… just doesn’t compute in my head, never did, and so:

This thread is called “Getting started with home networking”, and so far most of what has been said is already gibberish to me, even though I have heard much of it before in some form of mention, but there’s just no context, and it looks like a huge can of worms I am once again trying to open with a rock on a stick!

I do know that I want to stay far away from anything made by Microsoft.

Again, thanks for all of your efforts in advance! I love DLN!!

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Hey @VanZoiden and welcome! My idea never really took off unfortunately but I’d be happy to help you out in any way that I can! I totally agree with you when you talk about cross referencing posts and getting lost in jargon. I actually created a template and scale where a user could assess their own knowledge base and a contributor could rate their tutorial on that scale so you had an idea of scope before you committed lots of time.

What are some of your goals for your network? Currently I am using mostly raspberry pi computers for various tasks and would recommend those because if their low cost. I have a pi running docker (virtualization and isolated apps) which powers my reverse proxy (allows for multiple services to reach the internet with only have two exposed ports of entry and exit into my network) and many other self hosted services. I have another pi running HASS (home assistant) for home automation management and a final pi running PiHole which is a network wide ad blocker.
If you are looking for an easy way in, I highly recommend getting a raspberry pi zero w (~$5) and starting with pihole. It’s fairly easy to setup the pi but you learn about things like DNS, static IPs and port forwarding.
This holiday I am purchasing these for everyone in my family this year and remotely setting them up with pi hole. It’s great because since we are all stuck at home, limiting ads is something everyone appreciates.

I would be happy to help you do the same! We could get together in the DLN matrix chat if you use that or we could do a different method that’s more familiar.

We have a great community here, you spoiled also check out wiki.linuxdelta.com if you haven’t seen that yet. It’s Noah’s wiki and might be a little complex but it is a great resource.

Cheers,
-RC

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Goody goody gumdrops!! :heart_eyes: :crazy_face: :hugs:

I was looking for Noah’s wiki, but wasn’t even sure what exactly it was (Blog, Wiki…) nor where to find it (Thought it was on DLN somewhere). I should have taken note when I heard it on the Destination Linux show, but was distracted by all of the cool stuff they were getting into, and spaced it!

Well first things first, I do have some understanding of what DNS, IP and Mac addresses… are and how they work, and actually have pretty good conceptual understanding of all that, but it’s more of an implementation thing, where concept says little to nothing about the details.

Lets start with what I have now: I am on an Arch EndeavourOS box with KDE Plasma (hands down favorite), and this is my work station, but that’s kind of dangerous, because I really should have my business separated from my private uses. I have my own business, and I am a one man operation: a guitar builder and repair man mostly serving a 50 mile radius, so don’t need anything on a corporate or world wide level, at least not yet. I also don’t need and do not (cannot) trust any cloud, 3rd party services besides my ISP and web site host to where I have little choice but to trust them (I don’t really), and am already completely Microsoft and Google free including their sub companies, so no Youtube, Skype… and hate social media, and only use it to post rarely, and to tell people to go to my website, where I am in control and can protect their data. I don’t even have a database on my site, and really don’t want one for anything but serving php pages and the like, where I would prefer to have one here, it uploads to on a schedule, leaving no client info on my site, but my every attempt to make a data base in Libreoffice, Glam, Kexi and what not has failed miserably to make them do what I need them to, and even do so without crashing and malfunctioning. I have a contact form on my site, which is connected to my email, and all business related email gets retrieved by evolution every ten minutes, and any clients personal info is sent here, and deleted from the site after 3 days. I also am broke as a church mouse, after life long illness due to a disease that went undiegnosed for 45 years of my life, nearly killed me a few times, and caused financial ruin, occasional loss of everything I owned, including homelessness, so I really need to streamline my business, mostly the office part, now that I am of stable health and know how to treat it, so I can catch up with life, and although a world class craftsman, I suck at office stuff, especially business related stuff, but do run a tight ship, which costs me hours of work that could, and should be way more automated and efficient, and a network will be a part of it.

What I want:

To setup a home/office server; just an old Athlon Phenom box, until I can afford some new stuff (I have Raspberries in mind for the future if they are suited for what I need). From what I have read so far Fedora is a good choice (CentOS is way too difficult for me), and I did try Fedora server, and not having read what I was getting into, didn’t realize it came with no DE, and well, I am not your terminal kind of guy, as I have a memory like a sifter, and just cannot remember all of the commands, especially not ones I don’t use often, and the same goes for config and other file locations, so I will try again and make it a point to install a DE (Plasma), as soon as I can figure out how to get a network up and running, starting with setting up my wireless router (Netgear N300) or buy a switch or wired router when I have the funds if that is a better idea. It’s not working though, and I suspect that as soon as I plug it in, the wireless router from my ISP (AT&T) takes it over, and just annexes it as an access point or something, without asking for permission, killing my internet connection (the help line) in the process, and so became just one more mystery needing solving. I didn’t log on to the AT&T router to investigate though because I was already frustrated and tired, and not knowing if it was even a good idea to begin with, set it aside for when I had more info, and with all of the other stuff on my to do list, it had to wait.

So if and when I can establish a connection between the two boxes, I want to use this box to work on, but have everything related to my business on the other box, and control and access it from this one. First and foremost I need it to update itself over the internet, but not be accessible from the outside world, hidden from other networking devices in the area, and secured via a firewall… Since making a data base, didn’t work out, and probably couldn’t do what I needed it to without quite some doing, I have found some FOSS business software I want to give a shot (Manager and LedgerSMB), both needing to run on a server (LAMP?) so I can keep track of everything from inventory, jobs, taxes, purchasing, quotes, invoicing… because for now I have a bunch of Writer and Calc docs, text files… essentially a copy/paste office that takes up sometimes more time to fill out and keep records of a job, than the job itself, and I cannot in good conscious charge and bill my clients for that, so it really messes with productivity.

Once I have the most important office stuff up and running, then I may want to get fancy, and use the network for processor sharing (Beowulf style/cluster computing) for rendering Fractals in Mandelbulber, and videos in Kdenlive, serve music into the office, and shop areas, acquire a cnc and add it to the network… and other stuff as needed. KDE has file sharing (SAMBA) but that doesn’t seem to be quite what I was looking for, and think NFS (If that’s the right acronym) should be much more capable, and better suited for my needs.

For now, I have to install a suitable OS for networking (Fedora?), install a DE, both which I think I can handle, and just start with a simple wired connection between two boxes, I couldn’t get up and running despite it supposedly needing no more than an Ethernet cable of any kind, direct or crossover (I tried both) and addressing for which I was obviously looking at outdated or wrong info, or just missing something… so any help with that is already greatly appreciated, and more than I should ask for.

I will also check out Noah’s wiki who I am sure can help me with the business software stuff, but do have some shopping to do, which now includes navigating safely around maskholes.

It blows my mind that your attempt to gather and make up to date networking tutorials had little interest, seeing how hard it can be given the available info out there. :slightly_frowning_face:

If I am understanding this correctly, you want to keep business on the Athlom (your ledgersmb) but access the web gui from your personal computer? If that’s what you want to do that is pretty easy. I checked out ledgersmb in a docker container and it seems crazy robust for a 1 person operation but if that is the way you want to go (i don’t have any other solution) it should be easy to setup. There documentation has a couple of snags in terms of continuity IMO. If you want to keep it off the internet, that is easy too depending on your router configuration. I got a little lost in your story as to where you currently stand in terms of a router. . . i am guessing you have a combo device from ATT that is a modem and router? If that is the case, you’d get a double dchp server if you plug a netgear into it which would cause issues. You would have to setup up your ATT in bridge mode if you want the DHCP to be handled by the router.
I only use ubuntu/debian based things so I don’t know how useful i would be in terms of a fedora/centos steam setup.

Here is the docker-compose file i used

version: "3.2"
services:
  # Note that the container needs to be named "postgres" here,
  # because that allows us to use the default hostname ("postgres")
  # from the LedgerSMB configuration
  postgres:
    image: postgres:9.6-alpine
    environment:
      # Replace the password below for a secure setup
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: abc
      PGDATA: /var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata
    networks:
      - internal
    volumes:
      - "pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data"
  lsmb:
    depends_on:
      - postgres
    image: ledgersmb/ledgersmb:1.8
    networks:
      - internal
      - default
    # Uncomment the 'ports' section to map the LedgerSMB container port (5762)
    #  to the host's port of the same number, thus making LedgerSMB
    #  available on http://<host-dns-or-ip>:5762/
    #     SECURITY NOTE: Do this for evaluation purposes only!
    #       In production, be sure to use SSL/TLS to protect user's passwords
    #       and other sensitive data
    ports:
       - "5762:5762"
    environment:
      # The LSMB_WORKERS environment variable lets you select the number
      # of processes serving HTTP requests. The default number of 2 workers
      # is geared toward limited-memory situations (1 GB). In order to
      # improve the performance experience, increase memory and the
      # number of workers
      #
      LSMB_WORKERS: 2
      #
      #
      # SSMTP_ROOT:
      # SSMTP_HOSTNAME:
      # SSMTP_MAILHUB:
      # SSMTP_AUTH_USER:
      # SSMTP_AUTH_PASS:
      # SSMTP_AUTH_METHOD:
      # SSMTP_USE_STARTTLS:
      # SSMTP_FROMLINE_OVERRIDE:

# having the dbdata volume is required to persist our
# data between PostgreSQL container updates; without
# that, the data is contained in the same volume as
# the rest of the image and on update/upgrade, the
# data will be lost.
volumes:
  pgdata:


networks:
  internal:
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I have the At&T router, but don’t want it to have anything to do with my home network, other than internet access. For the home network I have an old but still good Netgear wireless router (with additional Ethernet ports) from the days when I had a wired internet connection through the phone line. I was hoping to use it wireless for the home network only, so isolated from AT&T router (They are known spy’s), and as far as I know it should be possible as a separate network via IP addressing (I know the right address ranges I can use). If not, I can use it wired, or even just use a direct Ethernet connection between the two computers.

I am on Archlinux with KDE Plasma, and the network manager is supposed to be easy to use, (it seamed to be), so I could just make the Athlon PC another Arch box, but which I tried already a while back, but I need to set all that up again, and make a connection between the two where they can ping each other and I get a successful handshake, and so far none of that has worked, even though I followed the instructions to a T. Intel box found Athlon box, but Athlon box didn’t find Intel box; Oh the insanity! :crazy_face: That was with a direct wired connection, as for the Netgear router: when I turned it on (nothing connected to use it wireless) It killed the internet connection (AT&T) or the At&T router saw it as a threat, (still may have to investigate). So all in all, I just need to establish a connection first, without killing the internet and getting lynched by my family.

I also just got a pile of other things to take care of that are turning out to be not very easy at all: Got a letter from the IRS: Someone filed a tax return in my name, and I never got my approved stimulus check either (may be related), but I am having a hard time contacting the IRS, and my new Audio interface broke less than a weak before the warranty runs out, and the MFG is giving me the run around, so I bitched them out and now they are ignoring me… Oh dear, what a fun time I am having.

I know little to nothing about virtual machines, containerization and all that, although I may want to try the latter, and don’t game at all, so don’t need Steam, but yes, I want the Robust :grinning: LedgerSMB to be on the Athlon box, along with everything related to my robust business :wink:, and access it all from this one, and also backup each computer to one another.

LedgerSMB may sound like a little too much for a one man operation, but I am not much different in procedures than any large corporation, as I have to keep the same records too, and by law, so if I can get it to do what I want it to, it will save me a ton of work and time (money) in the long run, as I would like to automate taxes, parts inventory and ordering, job quotes and time tracking, invoicing, and then some, which takes a lot longer than you may think. even 1/2 hour a day adds up very quickly. It will also allow me to spend less time doing dreaded office work, and more time building and repairing instruments, where my passion is.

Thanks for your help :slightly_smiling_face: but please don’t stay up late trying to help me, because as long as you get a notification for following this thread, you will hear from me sooner or later, more likely later though, but right now I am just swamped with stuff, and am in no rush to get it done right away, and when you do hear from me, no need to jump right on it: You probably have your own to do list.