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Learning more about networking
I am curious to learn more about networking and BGP. There's really no specific reason or goal, I just enjoy learning. I've seen dn42.eu mentioned here in the past and I think this might be a great way to learn. I had a few questions for the community and was wondering if anyone had any insights.
For starters, does anyone have any other great recommendations to help learn? I found this resource which I thought was helpful. I also saw Internet Routing Architectures 2nd Edition by Sam Halabi recommended.
Secondly, I was curious what people might recommend hardware wise. I was thinking about purchasing an old <$200 E3-1230 I could use with Bird. I might toss in a cheap Cisco or Juniper switch too, but I know that's not as important. I just wanted to make sure I don't purchase a server that's way too under-powered to run Bird or other recommended routing software.
Comments
Bird can run on 1 core and 2GB of ram.
Maybe check Comptia Network+ exam, there are various courses to prepare where you can learn more about networking etc.
My advise will be run GNS3 or eve-ng. Both are good products and work. You might get physical gear based on location, which is good for feel and touch but when you move more into depths of it, physical gear become so expensive that you will burn yourself. But again just an advise from someone who is already burnt. So, hope you will find someone better than me and taking my advise
For GNS3 or Eve-ng, start small with 12 vCPU [dedicated] and atleast 32GB of RAM. Not go for laptop, processor now a days will turn slow as soon as they heat up. Go for workstation or something similar on server side. Also try to work on linux as they work really great on it. You can always add more RAM and storage as you progress more into weeds of it. Dont waste money on very first day. Technology changes so rapidly that this suggestion might not be good one in a year or so. So, always think of what you want to learn in a year and plan for it with some option of expanding the setup if everything stays as it is.
Found another potentially good resource: https://learn.nsrc.org/bgp
Perfect, love overkill. I want to setup a home lab anyways!
I've found a lot of courses/exams end up being so focused on passing the test that you don't actually learn the material, just what's needed to pass.
If I understand, you're recommending this instead of dn42.eu as it'd let me emulate the entire environment locally? But also this would require a more resource intensive setup and not necessarily be as "real world"
Yes correct. dn42 looks promising but if you want to start from basics before moving to complex things, you want to run emulated environment first locally and once you are on higher side of things may be going to such services or even on the cloud hosted solution makes sense. As owning local hardware becomes more and more costly at the end.
This makes sense. It sounds like rather unfortunately, I have need for a local server anyways but that doesn't mean I can't self-host one of the emulated environments.
It'd cost me $30+ a month in electricity to do this at home given the high cost of power. What VPS providers would I be able to use that I could still connect to dn42.eu from?
I don't think there are any kind of restrictions (make sure you have a public ipv4). If you are going to run only a few services, if any, a low powered server will work just fine.
Interesting, I was under the impression I'd need a BGP session or something... Maybe I'll just wait for next Friday and grab something