Naomi Brockwell https://www.nbtv.media/episodes does a good job of blending accessible presentation of privacy issues with technically viable solutions. Recently she’s been more on an advocacy tack, but there are some gems in the back catalogue that explain not just why you should care but the sorts of products/software you can use to address your concerns. She provides suggestions, but you should take those as just an idea and develop your own answers!
So, in between watching those videos find out all you can about how Debian (for servers) and OpenWRT (for routers) work from their websites, and use $preferred_search_engine to learn about why Proxmox, Unbound, Postfix, Dovecot, XMMS, WireGuard, Nextcloud can help improve your privacy.
Get that used Optiplex, install a Linux on it and begin experimenting! Don’t worry about the perfect hardware config yet. You can source other parts if you feel you really need them later. Although more RAM is always good, but you knew that already.
Along the way you will want to learn enough to decide whether you prefer VMs or Containers, or a blend; which filesystem(s) you prefer; which distributions you are going to deploy; which backup system you are going to implement; whether Apache or Nginx; and whether you like systemd or want to simply blast off and nuke it from orbit. You may also want to take a look at Ansible now. And Git. Git has saved my server config bacon more times than I care to remember.
Not sure quite where to recommend you look for bang up to date introduction to Linux networking stuff these days. The Linux Networking Howto was hopelessly out of date ten years ago. The distribution howtos are pretty good on at least the basics. Wikipedia might be useful on more advanced topics. And then searching for specific problems or needs normally turns up some learned responses on stackexchange or equivalent.
And as one 90s kid to another, if you haven’t read Permanent Record by Edward Snowden yet, consider getting a copy. He grew up at the same time and does a great job of explaining why this journey matters.
Naomi Brockwell https://www.nbtv.media/episodes does a good job of blending accessible presentation of privacy issues with technically viable solutions. Recently she’s been more on an advocacy tack, but there are some gems in the back catalogue that explain not just why you should care but the sorts of products/software you can use to address your concerns. She provides suggestions, but you should take those as just an idea and develop your own answers!
So, in between watching those videos find out all you can about how Debian (for servers) and OpenWRT (for routers) work from their websites, and use $preferred_search_engine to learn about why Proxmox, Unbound, Postfix, Dovecot, XMMS, WireGuard, Nextcloud can help improve your privacy.
Get that used Optiplex, install a Linux on it and begin experimenting! Don’t worry about the perfect hardware config yet. You can source other parts if you feel you really need them later. Although more RAM is always good, but you knew that already.
Along the way you will want to learn enough to decide whether you prefer VMs or Containers, or a blend; which filesystem(s) you prefer; which distributions you are going to deploy; which backup system you are going to implement; whether Apache or Nginx; and whether you like systemd or want to simply blast off and nuke it from orbit. You may also want to take a look at Ansible now. And Git. Git has saved my server config bacon more times than I care to remember.
Not sure quite where to recommend you look for bang up to date introduction to Linux networking stuff these days. The Linux Networking Howto was hopelessly out of date ten years ago. The distribution howtos are pretty good on at least the basics. Wikipedia might be useful on more advanced topics. And then searching for specific problems or needs normally turns up some learned responses on stackexchange or equivalent.
And as one 90s kid to another, if you haven’t read Permanent Record by Edward Snowden yet, consider getting a copy. He grew up at the same time and does a great job of explaining why this journey matters.