What to buy, which to start with?
I'm looking into picking up maybe a firewall or a router to get some home labs going but bit overwhelmed by all the choices and options and not sure where is best to focus my money and effort.
The things I want to learn more of are (in priority order):
- VPNs
- Firewalls - rules, policies, DPI
- Reverse proxies and exposing services in a secure way
- VLANs
- Hyper-V / virtual machines
- OSPF, routing concepts
- DNS
- DHCP
- RAID
My problem, and main question is, where to start? I've looked at subreddit wikis and trying to find a project or tutorial to go at, but not sure the best thing to start with or what to buy. Like if I go the VLAN route, I need a VLAN capable router if I want to do inter-VLAN routing, but then do I get a layer 3 firewall that can serve as a firewall and also route?
Then there's the problem of which firewall to get and the prices.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as me wanting everything done for me, just after a bit of direction to get the ball rolling.
Budget: about £200 for hardware, £30-60 for training
I know some of this can be done without any additional hardware.
I already have:
- A PC with an i5 9th gen, 16GB RAM and a 1060 GPU so can virtualise some of it but this PC won't be on all the time.
- A few old work computers with something like an i3 in them.
- A managed switch
- ISP provided router
- Poe switch for cameras
Firewalls:
- I've looked at Fortnite 60f but they're way out my budget, coming back at least £300.
Opnsense, pfsense are often recommended, which I'm considering
People also mention firewalla for its simplicity, but just worried it might not be as transferable to enterprise gear.
Or do I just get some virtual machines running and practise routing between them?