I’ve been watching some One Marc Fifty stuff on YouTube. I can follow him well, and I’m decent at much of the hardware stuff. At least I can compile OpenWRT or do a basic Gentoo install with a custom kernel. I dread staring at NFTables, but can hack around some. I don’t fully understand networking from the abstract fundamentals. Are there any good sources that break down the subject like Ben Eater did with the 8 bit bread board computer, showing all the basic logic, buses, and registers surrounding the Arithmetic Logic Unit? I’m largely looking for a more fundamental perspective on what are the core components of the stack and what elements are limited to niche applications.
I just realized I want to use self signed client certificates between devices. It was one of those moments where I feel dumb for the limited scope of my knowledge about the scale of various problems and solutions.
I’m not sure, but I would be surprised if there was, especially for any sort of modern equipment. Networking hardware is really just a standard computer with a lot of specialized SoC chips specific to networking routines. So your generic home wireless router is an ARM chip, some ram, some storage, and then a wireless SoC chips, for example. Most of your enterprise type switches are basically the same Intel or AMD CPUs you’d find in a server with a ton of specialized single-purpose chips augments to offload specific jobs really fast.
So if there was a very basic beginner course to building networking hardware like, it would probably be using the concepts that 80’s hardware may have used I’d guess. Maybe try looking for someone building a modem or NIC from scratch?