I'm an Ooooooold Guy, like retired design EE not very close since the ARPANET. In retirement, I thought I'd keep up by building a network, put a server on it, and in general try to figure out what the IT Guys at the Lockheed Martin data center did. After reading through a few RFCs et al I thought it best to ask the Experts. So far my intent is to maintain an expertise in hobby mode and possibly help college-age grandkids. I've homeschooled myself to the point that I have a basic understanding of the OSI and TCP/IP. My issue now is the detail of the physical and logical implementation of NATs, DNSs, Firewalls, and how the link-local stuff works, that is, Admin and/or developer mode. I have a fiber-optic ISP, Centurylink, and a Netgear AX router but information detail with each of these Co.s is scarce. Are there any pay-as-you-go programs, hardware/software configuration classes, I could take advantage of? My first task will be to buy Hardware and/or software to experiment with.
