this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
12 points (92.9% liked)

Selfhosted

40219 readers
985 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

(I asked this on r*ddit a long while ago, but I don't think I explained myself properly)

Basically, I would like to host a few services on my own metal (and not anywhere else in the world!) to play around with and learn, like my personal site, lemmy instance, vpn, fdroid, image host, etc etc.

I would also like to hide my public IP address because I don't want people who connect to me to know my location (even if it's rather coarse).

I know that this isn't possible without at least another server in a different physical location, but I really have no idea how to approach this. What software do I run? What is this action called? What do any of these AWS/Azure service names mean? How much would I realistically need to pay? Etc etc.

Anyone have any pointers?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dap@lemmy.onlylans.io 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Cloudflare free tier + a reverse proxy will set you straight. You can add subdomains for your services as A records in Cloudflare off of your root domain, i.e. lemmy.yourdomain.tld, personalsite.yourdomain.tld, images.yourdomain.tld.

When doing this, enable the Cloudflare DNS proxy which will route DNS requests to your origin service through Cloudflares's CDN. This essentially "hides" your public IP as anyone doing a nslookup lemmy.yourdomain.tld will get Cloudflares's IPs back as a response.

Once you've done this, you can break everything back out to it's respective backend via a reverse proxy. For example, lemmy.yourdomain.tld gets passed to 192.168.0.10, personalsite.yourdomain.tld gets passed to 192.168.0.20, etc.

[–] augentism@thaumatur.ge 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

That's sounds so much simpler than what I am doing right now. Right now I have a digital ocean droplet server running openvpn and I have any servers I want open to the internet connecting to that openvpn server as a client. I then NAT all incoming traffic to the servers I have with iptables as if the droplet is a router. Is it much easier to setup a cloudflare tunnel? Or am I basically accomplishing the same thing? Will I be able to run all the other services I have because I'm not just web hosting? I also do not have a static IP.

[–] death916@lemmy.death916.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Since I didn't want to use cloudflare I use a free oracle vps with tailscale and a reverse proxy on it. Then thru tailscale all services from home can go to the proxy without forwarding any ports and services can be accessible

[–] dap@lemmy.onlylans.io 1 points 1 year ago

Cloudflare tunnels or a reverse proxy with Cloudflare DNS would be much easier to manage IMO. What you're doing will work but it seems like you have a lot of moving parts in your setup which can lead to errors creeping in.

With both proposed setups you should be able to pass non web-based traffic to their respective backends. In nginx that would look something like the following:

server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;
        server_name service.yoursite.tld;

        location / {
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header Host $host:$proxy_port;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                proxy_pass http://<IP of your service>:<port>;
        }
}

With Cloudflare tunnels you can setup a VM as your tunnel termination point and configure ingress rules to pass traffic where it needs to go, similar to this:

tunnel: <Tunnel UUID>
credentials-file: /root/.cloudflared/<Tunnel credentials>.json

ingress:
  - hostname: service1.yourdomain.tld
    service: http://192.168.0.10:80
  - hostname: service2.yourdomain.tld
    service: ssh://192.168.0.20:22
  - service: http_status:404 # This is a catch-all rule to handle unmatched ingress traffic

One thing you can do for your public IP is use something like inadyn to update cloudflare with your public IP when it changes. Inadyn is super lightweight and will make sure, +/- 5 minutes, that your public IP is up-to-date with Cloudflare.