Well my first reply is: setting up yor own router is like to learn driving with a touring car. You just need to know a lot to set up/handle everything properly. Its just not easy and in m opinion the most wrong point to start.

DNS-wise I would like to recommend something like pihole. To me it was my first thing I installed and used until this day and also the handling of DNS is quite easy. Maybe you should consider lerning other things before setting up your own router.

I am relatively sophisticated on LAN/local services (been running Raspberry Pi since 2018 or so), I was never able to setup a reverse proxy to get a true self-hosted system (i.e. remote access); got roadblocked by nginx and setting up letsencrypt with reverse proxy support.

In general, true remote access is IMO exponentially more difficult and demanding than getting things running on your local network.

For anyone starting out with self-hosting, I would strongly recommend LAN/local services where you can relatively easily deploy multiple very useful and powerful services (SMB/NAS, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Qbittorrent-Nox).

I would suggest looking into DietPi, it's IMO the best RaspberryPi/SBC distribution there is if you want things to just work and not bug you. Very helpful developers and community too. Excellent, user friendly CLI management tools for headless operation.

Check FUTO’s guide. It’s great for beginners:

• Part 1: youtu.be/Et5PPMYuOc8
• Part 2: youtu.be/3fW9TV1WQi8

Idk of any good series but techno Tim has a great video on using cloudflare and traefik to get wildcard letsencrypt ssls for your docker services.

youtu.be/n1vOfdz5Nm8

I am saving this thread to try and find a good tutorial for myself. That said, I have had a great experience on #networking on libera.chat, which is IRC. They have been very patient with me and often willing to go into detail in a beginner-friendly way.

Unfortunately, they are not accessible via the web chat, so you have to use an IRC client and register and account, which is relatively painless, but might take 10 to 15 minutes to get started.

libera.chat/guides/connect

In the past, I've found a lot of valuable resource at

• howtoforge.com/
• simplehomelab.com/
• networklessons.com/

One thing you really need to establish right from the start is the habit of taking detailed notes. It's tedious, bothersome at times, but the ability to backtrack something that may not have deployed quite like you wanted, is invaluable. It will also save your ass in a month when you've forgotten everything you did before.

Take notes!

Seems like you know what you need to study. I'd suggest searching for the topics and reading. Don't try to skim, there is a lot to read and learn but it will be worth it, it will open many doors for you. Tutorials in this domain have usually an issue that following a track to achieve something the author can't really explain everything on the path to the depth because, well, it would be lots of reading anyway and it would end up to be documentation rather than tutorial.

What I tend to do, it may or may not help you, depends on your individual way of learning, is I search for a topic to find some good article. Takes time, but then, usually, after the read I have more things from the article I need to understand more. This sort of branching leads to a good wholesome of a knowledge. In the past I used to skim a lot, which resulted in a lots of trial and error instances, eventually it lead to frustration from not knowing what the heck I was doing. When I realized reading and understanding should not really be skipped/skimmed, I started learning a lot.