this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Selfhosted

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104
Ok, how do I start self-hosting? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I've been following this community for some time in order to learn about self-hosting and, while I have learnt about a bunch of cool web services to host, I'm still lost on where/how to start. Does anyone have, like, a very beginner guide that is not just "install this distro and click these buttons"? I have an old laptop that runs Arch (btw), but I'm not familiar with networking at all. So anything starting from "you can check your IP address using ip a" would be appreciated.

More specifically, I have a domain that I want to point to an old laptop of mine (I intend to switch to a VPS if/when I feel like the laptop is starting to lose it). How do I expose my laptop to the internet for this to work (ideally without touching my router, because I'll be traveling quite a bit with my laptop and don't mind the occasional downtime). I assume that once I'm able to type my domain name on my mobile and see it open anything from my laptop, I can then setup all the services I want via nginx, but that's step 2. I tried to follow a few online guides but, like I mentioned, they're either too simplistic (no I don't want to move to Ubuntu Server just for this) or too complex (no I don't know how DHCP works).

Thanks in advance

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You might want to consider setting up a VPN tunnel to your own network. Main benefit is that you can access your home network as if you were connected to it locally. Which makes switching between mobile data and WiFi a non-issue.

This requires some sort of VPN server and usually a single port-forwarding rule for the protocol which your VPN software of choice uses. For the simplest default configuration of OpenVPN this means setting UDP port 1194 to point to your OpenVPN server.

Generally, keeping things simple, there's two types of VPN you can set up:

  • split tunnel VPN, which gives you access to your home network but accesses the internet directly.
  • full tunnel VPN, which sends all of your traffic through your home router.

It is a little more complicated than that, and there's more nuance to it, such as wether to user your own DNS server or not, but all that is best left to some further reading.

I've setup an OpenVPN server myself, wich is open source and completely free to mess around with. (Save for maybe some costs for registring your own domain or DDNS serviced. Those are all optional though, and mainly provide convienience and continuity benefits. You can definitely just setup a VPN server and connect with your external IP adress)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Or use Tailscale, it's quite easy and it's how I access all of my services