this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
13 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40452 readers
364 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
13
Selfhosting behind VPN? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by stonesimulator to c/selfhosted
 

I have played around with yunohost and other similar tools. I know how to open ports on router, configure port forwarding. I am also interested on hosting my own stuff for experiments, but I also have a VPN enabled for privacy reasons on my router at all times. If you haven't guessed already, I am very reserved on revealing my home IP for selfhosting, as contradictory as it sounds.

I am aware that it's better to rent a VPS, not to mention the dynamic IP issues, but here it goes: assuming my VPN provider permits port forwarding, is it possible to selfhost anything from behind a VPN, including the virtual machine running all the necessary softwares?

edit: title

edit2: I just realized my VPN provider is discontinuing port forwarding next month. Why?!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Mountaineer 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Absolutely possible.
The key to simple self hosting is to have a dns record that points to your externally accessible IP, whether that be your real one or an external one hosted at a VPN provider.
If that IP changes, you'll need to update it dynamically.

It's becoming increasibly common to be a requirement to do so as CGNat becomes more widespread.

One of the newer ways to do that is with a Cloudflare Tunnel, which whilst technically is only for web traffic, they ignore low throughput usage for other things like SSH.

[–] stonesimulator 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My knowledge is a little dated and I remember messing around dyndns or noip to update my IP many years ago. I guess a simple script running on the router or the host should suffice?

[–] Mountaineer 2 points 1 year ago

I personally use a bash script triggered by cron on my server to first determine my external IP address: curl http://v4.ident.me/ then if it differed from the last check, would update one of my dns entries via the godaddy API.

This can be a simple or as complicated as you like.