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
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.
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.
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?