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
You’d probably need to configure your router if you want to access your laptop when you’re outside of your home network (e.g. from a mobile phone). If there’s an incoming connection to port 443 (https), your router doesn’t even know which device in the network could handle it. Port forwarding should be easy to set up on any modern router using their web interface. Same applies to some VPS providers like AWS Lightsail, they might have firewalls.
Like with every big task, take it step by step. You can’t learn everything overnight, start with something small. Set up a web server (e.g. nginx) what will act as a reverse proxy. Make it accessible from the internet. Then try to set up one of the services from your list and focus on it.
Learn one thing at a time, don’t rush and avoid context switching.
Welp, port-forwarding seems to be the major issue then, since I’m soon going to shift to an institutional wifi where I may (not) have access to the router. But you’re right, I should try getting familiar with what I have first lol. Thanks!