6 ms·

I’m curious. Are there any new major difficulties when setting up home servers? Last time I tried it was a little annoying with dynamic IPs getting in the way,

I’m curious. Are there any new major difficulties when setting up home servers? Last time I tried it was a little annoying with dynamic IPs getting in the way, but possible with just a port forward or UPnP. Are ISPs making changes to prevent this?

southerntofu 5y ago
That's about it. In addition, some ISPs make sure you cannot change the resolver advertised on DHCP, and that your own IP is routed via the Internet and back (so local requests are slow as hell), both of which can be hacked around by running your own router behind the ISP's modem/router. Of course, the real solution to the problem is to find a decent ISP, like a non-profit from FFDN.org federation. Then you have "real" internet and no worries for selfhosting.
nottorp 5y ago
And how much time/expertise do you need to not trigger all kinds of warnings in modern browsers?
- space_fountain 5y ago
  Fairly little? I think you might be thinking of email where running your own email sever is tough
  - phicoh 5y ago
    Receiving mail is also not hard. You may have to deal with the bonus mail (spam). But that's it.
- phicoh 5y ago
  Close to none. Just a letsencrypt cert and not completely outdated ciphers is enough.
  - nottorp 5y ago
    :) "Just a letsencrypt cert". That's right for me and most off the HN audience. Is it right for the general public?
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      > Is it right for the general public? My Asus router has a checkbox for dynamic DNS and for getting Let's Encrypt certs. See Method 2: * https://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1034294/#a2 https://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1034294/#a2
    - LinuxBender 5y ago
      Yes. Even the most complex technical setup can be accomplished by a non-technical person that can follow directions assuming that someone took the time to write clear and concise directions and included common caveats and troubles that one may run into and where to check for them. I have proven this many times over by having managers and directors that were non-technical follow my instructions. In the rare moments this breaks down, forums and chat rooms can be a very handy gap-filler and provides an indirect feedback loop to further improve documentation.
    - phicoh 5y ago
      Yes, because if you web server publicly reachable, letencrypt can be automated easily. And there is plenty of letsencrypt software that does fully automates this. A public web server is the easy part if you want to do letsencrypt.
      - vetinari 5y ago
        Letsencrypt is easy, if you are running generic Linux distribution and can easily install whatever you want. But you might run a device that already comes with software, and letsencrypt support is either limited (example: Synology; their implementation allows only http-01 challenge so if you need dns-01, tough luck. Even wildcards are a new feature) or non-existent (example: Ubiquiti, and their cloud keys (administration UI, guest portal) or routers (Radius/WPA Enterprise needs TLS cert too)).
jeroenhd 5y ago
I've never run into trouble running stuff from home. SMTP from home is always going to be problematic, though. The lack of IPv4 address space has started a trend of CGNAT which makes hosting from home nearly impossible. Luckily, IPv6 continues to be rolled out, but in many situations thst would lead to your services only being reachable through IPv6. There are still a great many outdated networks out there that can't reach IPv6, so you might run into trouble there. If you can get a public IPv4 IP address, I see no reason why you'd run into issues. That's more of an ISP problem than a hosting problem, in my opinion.
- dannyw 5y ago
  most ISPs in Australia offer a static IPv4 for a monthly fee ($5 to $10 a month).
  - opk 5y ago
    If you're going to pay $10 a month, you might as well pay for a VPS instead and connect up to it with wireguard, nebula or tailscale. Especially if paying means dynamic IPv4 that isn't behind CGNAT rather than an actual static IPv4 address.
    - dannyw 5y ago
      Paying gives you a static IPv4 that remains the same for as long as you're subscribed. It's not a bad option if you're already paying for gigabit, sadly nearly impossible to get symmetrical gigabit here, but still for an extra $5 or $10 a month it's ok.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    That's an ISP problem, though. For that price it's better to just rent a VPS for hosting/proxying traffic. A wireguard tunnel to your actual home server and an nginx proxy at a $4 VPS provide more options than just a guaranteed static IP. Hell, if you can nab some capacity, you can use free VPS solutions like the one AWS and Google provide for a year, or the one Oracle providers forever if you can live with the 50mbps uplink (you get 2 servers so maybe you could tunnel that into 100mbps?) and the annoying Web UI for setting them up. Luckily, you don't need a static IP address in most use cases if you set up dyndns, as long as the IP is exclusively used by you and doesn't change too often (e.g. every week or month or so).

southerntofu 5y ago

That's about it. In addition, some ISPs make sure you cannot change the resolver advertised on DHCP, and that your own IP is routed via the Internet and back (so local requests are slow as hell), both of which can be hacked around by running your own router behind the ISP's modem/router. Of course, the real solution to the problem is to find a decent ISP, like a non-profit from FFDN.org federation. Then you have "real" internet and no worries for selfhosting.

nottorp 5y ago

And how much time/expertise do you need to not trigger all kinds of warnings in modern browsers?

space_fountain 5y ago
Fairly little? I think you might be thinking of email where running your own email sever is tough
- phicoh 5y ago
  Receiving mail is also not hard. You may have to deal with the bonus mail (spam). But that's it.
phicoh 5y ago
Close to none. Just a letsencrypt cert and not completely outdated ciphers is enough.
- nottorp 5y ago
  :) "Just a letsencrypt cert". That's right for me and most off the HN audience. Is it right for the general public?
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > Is it right for the general public? My Asus router has a checkbox for dynamic DNS and for getting Let's Encrypt certs. See Method 2: * https://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1034294/#a2 https://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1034294/#a2
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    Yes. Even the most complex technical setup can be accomplished by a non-technical person that can follow directions assuming that someone took the time to write clear and concise directions and included common caveats and troubles that one may run into and where to check for them. I have proven this many times over by having managers and directors that were non-technical follow my instructions. In the rare moments this breaks down, forums and chat rooms can be a very handy gap-filler and provides an indirect feedback loop to further improve documentation.
  - phicoh 5y ago
    Yes, because if you web server publicly reachable, letencrypt can be automated easily. And there is plenty of letsencrypt software that does fully automates this. A public web server is the easy part if you want to do letsencrypt.
    - vetinari 5y ago
      Letsencrypt is easy, if you are running generic Linux distribution and can easily install whatever you want. But you might run a device that already comes with software, and letsencrypt support is either limited (example: Synology; their implementation allows only http-01 challenge so if you need dns-01, tough luck. Even wildcards are a new feature) or non-existent (example: Ubiquiti, and their cloud keys (administration UI, guest portal) or routers (Radius/WPA Enterprise needs TLS cert too)).

jeroenhd 5y ago

I've never run into trouble running stuff from home. SMTP from home is always going to be problematic, though. The lack of IPv4 address space has started a trend of CGNAT which makes hosting from home nearly impossible. Luckily, IPv6 continues to be rolled out, but in many situations thst would lead to your services only being reachable through IPv6. There are still a great many outdated networks out there that can't reach IPv6, so you might run into trouble there. If you can get a public IPv4 IP address, I see no reason why you'd run into issues. That's more of an ISP problem than a hosting problem, in my opinion.

dannyw 5y ago
most ISPs in Australia offer a static IPv4 for a monthly fee ($5 to $10 a month).
- opk 5y ago
  If you're going to pay $10 a month, you might as well pay for a VPS instead and connect up to it with wireguard, nebula or tailscale. Especially if paying means dynamic IPv4 that isn't behind CGNAT rather than an actual static IPv4 address.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Paying gives you a static IPv4 that remains the same for as long as you're subscribed. It's not a bad option if you're already paying for gigabit, sadly nearly impossible to get symmetrical gigabit here, but still for an extra $5 or $10 a month it's ok.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  That's an ISP problem, though. For that price it's better to just rent a VPS for hosting/proxying traffic. A wireguard tunnel to your actual home server and an nginx proxy at a $4 VPS provide more options than just a guaranteed static IP. Hell, if you can nab some capacity, you can use free VPS solutions like the one AWS and Google provide for a year, or the one Oracle providers forever if you can live with the 50mbps uplink (you get 2 servers so maybe you could tunnel that into 100mbps?) and the annoying Web UI for setting them up. Luckily, you don't need a static IP address in most use cases if you set up dyndns, as long as the IP is exclusively used by you and doesn't change too often (e.g. every week or month or so).