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Locally hosting an internet-connected server

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

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Re: Locally hosting an internet-connected server

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok so this is genuinely a case of I see an expression for the first time, learn an expression it, and then see it again immediately after. Fun.

The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon strikes again!

I just learned about this yesterday.

Re: Locally hosting an internet-connected server

#83
post #29

This and the comments highlight how bad many ISPs in North America and Western Europe are at IPv6, still , in 2025, and the lengths to which people will go to treat that as damage and literally route around it. One of the biggest ISPs in my country has been promising IPv6 since 2016. Another, smaller, competitor, advertised on "World IPv6 Day" in 2011 that it was way ahead of the competition on supplying IPv6; but in…

Once again I voice the only sane option: Skip IPv6 and the insanity that it is, and do IPv8 and simply double (or quadruple) the address space without introducing other new things.

This is a pipe dream in the current century. IPv6 adoption has been slow but it’s approaching 50% and absolutely nobody is going to go through the trouble of implementing a new protocol; updating every operating system, network, and security tool; and waiting a decade for users to upgrade without a big advantage. “I don’t want to learn IPv6” is nowhere near that level of advantage.

Re: Locally hosting an internet-connected server

#85
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CGNAT is completely irrelevant to the average person. It’s only an issue if you expect others to connect to you, which is something that almost all people don’t need. (inb4 but the internet was made to receive connections! Well yes, decades ago maybe. But that’s not the way things have evolved. Get with the times.)

> It’s only an issue if you expect others to connect to you, which is something that almost all people don’t need. Unless they're playing video games: * https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27339... * https://www.checkmynat.com/posts/optimizing-nat-settings-for... The video game industry is bigger than movies, television, and music combined: * https://www.marketing-beat.co.uk/2024/10/22/dentsu-gamin…

Pathetic that in 2025 there still are games that rely on p2p connections, to the detriment of the experience because cheating can’t be detected server-side. GTA 5 is one of them.

Re: Locally hosting an internet-connected server

#86
post #4
post #2

Why not use a dynamic DNS service instead? I’ve been using dyn.com (now oci.dyn.com) for years and it has worked great. A bonus is many home routers have support built in.

I have multiple devices on my internal network that I want to exist outside, and dynamic DNS is only going to let me expose one of them

Yes, that's how it works when you only have a single IP. The standard way to deal with this is a reverse proxy for web requests. Other services require different workarounds. I have a port 22 SSH server for git activities, and another on a different port that acts as a gateway. From that machine I can SSH again to anywhere within my local network.

It's really not onerous or complicated at all. It's about as simple as it gets. I'm hosting a dozen web services behind a single IP4 address. Adding a new service is even easier than without the proxy setup. Instead of dicking around with my firewall and port forwarding, I just add an entry to my reverse proxy. I don't even use IPs, I just let my local DNS resolve hostnames for me. Easy as.

Re: Locally hosting an internet-connected server

#87
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s only an issue if you expect others to connect to you, which is something that almost all people don’t need. Unless they're playing video games: * https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27339... * https://www.checkmynat.com/posts/optimizing-nat-settings-for... The video game industry is bigger than movies, television, and music combined: * https://www.marketing-beat.co.uk/2024/10/22/dentsu-gamin…

Pathetic that in 2025 there still are games that rely on p2p connections, to the detriment of the experience because cheating can’t be detected server-side. GTA 5 is one of them.

If I've purchased a video game, why should I have to be reliant on the publisher's servers being up? Self-hosting should be a thing:

* https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41339173-Self-Hosted-...

At the very least if a game publisher wants to power down their own servers because they don't feel it's "worth" supporting their customers, they should post the server code so that the customers can continue to use the product they 'bought'.

Re: Locally hosting an internet-connected server

#88
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pathetic that in 2025 there still are games that rely on p2p connections, to the detriment of the experience because cheating can’t be detected server-side. GTA 5 is one of them.

If I've purchased a video game, why should I have to be reliant on the publisher's servers being up? Self-hosting should be a thing: * https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41339173-Self-Hosted-... At the very least if a game publisher wants to power down their own servers because they don't feel it's "worth" supporting their customers, they should post the server code so that the customers can continue to use the p…

Completely agree with the last paragraph.

Re: Locally hosting an internet-connected server

#89
post #72
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the protocol. For web, sure - for ssh, nope, since the protocol doesn't indicate which machine it's trying to connect to and so you don't know where to proxy it to.

I don't know what you mean by "the protocol". There is a destination IP address on every packet... getsockname() will tell the proxy which local IP the client dialed, allowing it to create "virtual hosts" (or you can actually run multiple proxies bound on different local addresses).

I have one public IP address. I have three machines behind it that I want to SSH into. How does the machine with the public address know where to route an incoming port 22 packet? For HTTPS this is easy - browsers send the desired site in the SNI field of the TLS handshake, so the frontend can look at that and route appropriately. For SSH there's no indication of which host the packet is intended for.

Re: Locally hosting an internet-connected server

#90

I run a very small VPS at Hetzner with Pangolin on it that takes care of all the Traefic Wireguard tunneling to my home servers. Very easy to set up and operate. https://fossorial.io/

Cool! Do you like that approach? I've thought about setting up that exact thing but I wasn't sure how well it would work in practice. Are there any pitfalls you ran into early on? I might give it a shot after your "very easy to set up and operate" review!

Honestly it was very easy. Their documentation is decent, and the defaults are good.

Setting up Pangolin on the VPS, and Newt on your lan, connecting them and adding e.g. a small demo website as a resource on Pagolin will take you about half an hour (unless your domain propagation is slow, so always start by defining the name in DNS and point it to your VPS IP to start with. You can use a wildcard if you do not want to manually make a new DNS entry each time)

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