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).
This is what I was planning to go with, until I read a couple posts/comments here about privacy issues with this approach (something something cloudflare has to read every incoming request to stop spam). By VPN, you mean I just connect the server to a VPN and put the VPN’s address as my server’s address?
I was also going to suggest tunnels (Cloudflare, ngrok, etc) as a great way to test out your setup without worrying about the networking side. They’re not a great long-term solution, but a great step before diving into vpn configuration or messing with a new router.
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To point your domain to your machine you can use Cloudflare tunnels. If you don’t want it publicly available, you can use a VPN.
This is what I was planning to go with, until I read a couple posts/comments here about privacy issues with this approach (something something cloudflare has to read every incoming request to stop spam). By VPN, you mean I just connect the server to a VPN and put the VPN’s address as my server’s address?
I was also going to suggest tunnels (Cloudflare, ngrok, etc) as a great way to test out your setup without worrying about the networking side. They’re not a great long-term solution, but a great step before diving into vpn configuration or messing with a new router.