Here's how our home router is set up at our code school:
I bought a cheap gigabit router (from craigslist for around $30) and then bought a wireless range extender ($60) for the far end of the house. The router is not connected to the modem (so obviously no internet). We built our own server to host all the code, exercises, videos, as well as a DNS server. Our gitlab repository is resolved to google.com, so they usually get a kick out of pushing their code to 'google'. We have our own internal q/a site that resolves to facebook.com. Everybody gets to pick their own domain name to host their own projects.
We experience 0 downtime (unless there is a power outage), pushes to our repository is almost instantaneous, and tests run blazing fast on our speedy i7 desktop with 62GB Ram (that I got for $600 on craigslist). Also, students are not limited to their machines, they can code on whichever device they want (as long as it runs chrome or ssh) because code is hosted on the server. This way, we don't have to deal with people's installation problems.
I didn't touch the router's firmware at all. Our server acts as a dns server. However, everybody would have to modify their dns records on their wifi settings to add our server's ipaddress.
I learned from http://tldp.org/HOWTO/DHCP/x369.html#DHCPSERVER when I got tired of auto-managing IP addresses -- the basic setup is not terrible. If you're using something else for DHCP assignment (e.g. PfSense) you can usually just provide the extra DNS server in the config there and it propagates out.
as you get more experienced it becomes less of "where can I learn x" and more of "how can I do x". You should be able to take a high level concept and look for ways/tools to implement it. For starters, web devs should know about dns. The first step would be, 'install a dns server' and then figuring out as you go. I think the deeper into the rabbit hole you go, the less quality tutorials there are and you have to rely on your problem solving abilities to figure things out.
I bought a cheap gigabit router (from craigslist for around $30) and then bought a wireless range extender ($60) for the far end of the house. The router is not connected to the modem (so obviously no internet). We built our own server to host all the code, exercises, videos, as well as a DNS server. Our gitlab repository is resolved to google.com, so they usually get a kick out of pushing their code to 'google'. We have our own internal q/a site that resolves to facebook.com. Everybody gets to pick their own domain name to host their own projects.
We experience 0 downtime (unless there is a power outage), pushes to our repository is almost instantaneous, and tests run blazing fast on our speedy i7 desktop with 62GB Ram (that I got for $600 on craigslist). Also, students are not limited to their machines, they can code on whichever device they want (as long as it runs chrome or ssh) because code is hosted on the server. This way, we don't have to deal with people's installation problems.
I didn't touch the router's firmware at all. Our server acts as a dns server. However, everybody would have to modify their dns records on their wifi settings to add our server's ipaddress.