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Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

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31–40 of 321 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#31

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean. It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more dece…

If you have a linux box that's always on on your network, you can throw in a simple cron entry to curl a dynamic dns provider (entrydns.org works pretty well in my experience), which updates their dns entry for a url you set. Set up OpenVPN on your router, VPN to the URL, voila, access to your self-hosted services.

You definitely shouldn't expose most of these things directly to the net, they're not always bulletproofed as much as one would like.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#32

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean. It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more dece…

I’m using a 3$ VPS (hetzner) as a VPN server and access my local servers that way. You also get a regular VPN for free that way and setup is trivial if you use wireguard.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#33

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean. It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more dece…

My home IP is technically not static but doesn't change, even with router reboots. I still have dynamic dns set up, however, because I don't trust that to not change. My ISP threw a warning when I forwarded port 80 (something about the TV service) but I haven't had any issues (though I serve stuff mostly off 443). It's actually really convenient, especially since I have a few ten-year-old laptops I can use to host stuff. Since I got symmetric gigabit FTTH, I can do basically anything with it, even hosting big files.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#34

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean. It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more dece…

Up until recently I used dynamic DNS and it worked well for a small website and calender server (radicale).

For hosting an email server a static IP is all but required, so I got the free tier VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro VPS at Oracle Cloud. It has a static IP and I forward stuff to my rpi3 with dyndns. All you need for this is a credit card.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#35

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean. It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more dece…

I've been using DuckDNS [1]. If your IP address changes it could take up to 5 minutes to update, but in practice I haven't had any problems with it.

[1]: http://www.duckdns.org/

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#36

Setting up a pi-hole DNS server for my wifi network was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Horrifying to see what percentage of traffic is on the ad server blacklist though...

I was going to do this, but you can usually just change the DNS and add a hosts file to your router assuming it can run firmware that allows it (like tomato or ddwrt). It seemed pointless to try since the charts work for http and everything is https now. I didn't setup specs for traffic but the setup I use is much lighter. Just wanted to suggest this for anyone who might want to block on their home network. I also use it as a NAS with USB3.0 to SATA with An SSD.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#37

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean. It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more dece…

Switch to a better ISP.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#38

How do people access these servers off of their home network (or do they not?). That seems like most of the value to me, hosting some service you can access from anywhere without having to use Digital Ocean. It seems like most residential ISPs don't provide a static IP and some block port 80? I think forcing ISPs to allow home users to serve traffic via some standard method would go a long way to enabling a more dece…

Dynamic DNS and WireGuard

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#39
post #25

Setting up a pi-hole DNS server for my wifi network was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Horrifying to see what percentage of traffic is on the ad server blacklist though...

I wasn't aware that my Samsung Smart TV had been logging almost my every action on the TV until I set up a PiHole server. Also, my respect for Apple grew by the fact that only device that wasn't doing loads of telemetry turned out to be my Macbook in the whole household.

Yes!! I was so grossed out by all the logs from my Smart TV. I'm embarrassed to say that I worked in ad tech (as an engineer) for years but I still didn't fully comprehend how pervasive that kind of tracking is in literally every environment.

Re: Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications

#40
post #3

On my Raspberry Pi 3 I'm running Hypriot OS which installs a minimal host OS and then just runs Docker. Thanks to cloud-init (Old version though) you can even pre-configure the boot image with your SSH key etc. which allows you to automate your initial install. https://blog.hypriot.com/downloads/ https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/0.7.9/topics/capabilitie...

Ubuntu for the RPi also uses cloud-init. I use it create a default user with my username instead of the ubuntu user, deploy ssh keys, install packages and configure the network on newly deployed Pi's.
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