Hey ya’ll!
I’ve recently finally pulled the trigger an converted an old Lenovo laptop into a home server running Debian. I don’t have any formal computer science background, but I grew up around PCs and cut my teeth on MS-DOS and WinNT since my pops worked at IBM and HP when I was a kid. I’ve dipped my toes into the microcontroller world working on a project to build permanent RGB Christmas lights so my in-laws wouldn’t need to climb ladders every season.
Seeing some videos of CasaOS finally made me think “Oh, I can totally do that!”, and so far the experience has been great. I’ve always ground my teeth a bit at the privacy concerns of third-party cloud services, so this has been a great experience so far. My family has been pleased with the performance and usability of Jellyfin and HomeAssistant. I have learned that simply port-forwarding to my server insecure, and that I should be using a reverse proxy if I want to access my home server remotely.
So far, things have been pretty intuitive or easily tutorialized, but I feel like I’ve reached the edges of my competence when it comes to setting up my own reverse proxy using NginX with CasaOS. I am hesitant to blindly follow step-by-step instructions to for the DNS and SSL shenanigans. It may get me through the intial setup, but I feel robbed of a learning experience and I would be SOL if it needed troubleshooting. Other video tutorials I have found seem to target an audience that has more background knowledge than I do. Tinkering with things inside my own local network is fine. Exposing things to the public web introduces safety concerns that I would like to treat with the proper respect, even if that means learning things from scratch. I’m not currently looking for a career in IT, but I would like to be empowered enough to make competent decisions about how I manage my home network.
I am smart enough to know when I am out of my depth, and I would really appreciate any resources the community can share so I can learn about securing my home server properly. Do you know of any good books, youtube series, or online courses? I send my sincerest gratitude all of you beautiful folks!