[jerf]

"The principles, basic admin & debugging part can be learned in a couple of hours,"

In principle, yes. In reality I've gone looking for a resource that I could do this with and come up short.

(I am starting to get really annoyed at things where I can find a million "paste this bit to do that thing" and there are so darned many of those on the internet that any hope of finding a good resource that gets to the underlying structure such that I can figure out how to do these things myself is virtually nil. It seems like this is getting worse as the search engines continue their trend of taking your query as a vague suggestion of the sort of thing you're looking for.)

[mhitza]

Maybe I'll write that guide, and then (fingers crossed) people will find it via search engines (before all search engines become just an LLM frontend).

[jerf]

Well, if you do, my email is in my profile and I'll be happy to be an advance proofreader if you're interested. I've got a couple of teens in a very similar position as well, so I can even provide multiple people's point of view. I have pretty much the exact right amount of experience for that; I've been in there, I've done things, even completed a couple of non-trivial projects (nothing amazing, but, more than just "a pad with a pocket in it"), I recognize I'm confused, I don't know where to proceed from there.

[jerf]

Scratch this, this was in error. It referred to a version of the post I never posted and I got myself confused.

[KAMSPioneer]

I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I (well, my employer) picked up a copy of a book on SELinux System Administration (that's the title) and it has served just this function for me.

It won't make you an expert but it takes the voodoo out of the whole process, if that makes sense. And it is reasonably short if you skip the stuff that you're (probably) never going to configure like passing labelled traffic between hosts with IPSEC.