I’ve been dabbling with selfhosting for a bit now (home assistant and nextcloud), but it’s clear that I lack a fundamental understanding of networking. For example:
- I’ve got OpenWRT on my router, but no idea what I’m doing when it comes to firewall settings, DNS, DHCP, etc.
- I’ve got a domain thru Porkbun, but no idea how to properly setup my DNS settings there to route to my local machine.
- I’ve got NGINX running in a docker container in a VM and can get to the UI on my local network, but no idea what I’m doing wrong with my attempts at a reverse proxy.
Does anyone here have links to a good in-depth tutorial series for learning about securely selfhosting?
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I think NetworkChuck has a good set of tutorial videos about self hosting. For the most part you can search for what you want to find info on and he probably had a video on it. E.g. Nginx: https://m.youtube.com/@NetworkChuck/search?query=Nginx
I’ll check him out, thanks!
When I was stumbling on some of his output it unfortunately felt very click-baity, always playing on your FOMO if you didn’t set up/download/buy the next best thing until the other next best thing in the video after.
In other words, I think he’s cool to check out to get to know of a thing, but to get a deeper level of understanding how a thing works I would recommend written materials. There are good caddy/nginx tutorials out there, but a linux networking book will get your understanding further yet.
If it has to be video, I would at least recommend a little more slowed down, long-form content like Learn Linux TV.
In the past, I’ve found a lot of valuable resource at
One thing you really need to establish right from the start is the habit of taking detailed notes. It’s tedious, bothersome at times, but the ability to backtrack something that may not have deployed quite like you wanted, is invaluable. It will also save your ass in a month when you’ve forgotten everything you did before.
Take notes!
Yup, good notes are really the difference between beginner and expert self-hosters. Write the notes as if they’re documentation to be read by someone who has never seen them before. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll remember things; that is the devil talking. You will forget in 6 months when you’re looking at it again.
that is the devil talking
It truly is. At my age and with other things combined, I can turn around twice in the lab and my brain will flat line.
I’m a bit farther along, but it’s all been trial and error (and error, and error…) So, commenting because I would also like some of this info. My DNS is a disaster! Still using IPs to access my VMs, mostly.
I know there may be some which are better for various reasons, but look into nginx proxy manager to get those resources behind some URLs with SSL. I like it because it’s got a pretty easy to use web interface, but I know similar things can be accomplished with traefik and like a 3 line per service yaml file. I use NPM and a pihole for DNS to point to the NPM server, and it’s great for me, including automatic cert rotation with LetsEncrypt.
Check FUTO’s guide. It’s great for beginners:
- Part 1: https://youtu.be/Et5PPMYuOc8
- Part 2: https://youtu.be/3fW9TV1WQi8
Well my first reply is: setting up yor own router is like to learn driving with a touring car. You just need to know a lot to set up/handle everything properly. Its just not easy and in m opinion the most wrong point to start.
DNS-wise I would like to recommend something like pihole. To me it was my first thing I installed and used until this day and also the handling of DNS is quite easy. Maybe you should consider lerning other things before setting up your own router.
I am relatively sophisticated on LAN/local services (been running Raspberry Pi since 2018 or so), I was never able to setup a reverse proxy to get a true self-hosted system (i.e. remote access); got roadblocked by nginx and setting up letsencrypt with reverse proxy support.
In general, true remote access is IMO exponentially more difficult and demanding than getting things running on your local network.
For anyone starting out with self-hosting, I would strongly recommend LAN/local services where you can relatively easily deploy multiple very useful and powerful services (SMB/NAS, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Qbittorrent-Nox).
I would suggest looking into DietPi, it’s IMO the best RaspberryPi/SBC distribution there is if you want things to just work and not bug you. Very helpful developers and community too. Excellent, user friendly CLI management tools for headless operation.
I am saving this thread to try and find a good tutorial for myself. That said, I have had a great experience on #networking on libera.chat, which is IRC. They have been very patient with me and often willing to go into detail in a beginner-friendly way.
Unfortunately, they are not accessible via the web chat, so you have to use an IRC client and register and account, which is relatively painless, but might take 10 to 15 minutes to get started.
Great guides https://www.simplehomelab.com/
I have some script or maybe it was a program in a container that checks my isp IP and uses the domain provider api to keep the DNS set to the isp IP if it changes. I’m using opnsense but I’m sure openwrt has the same thing in some form.
That’s just DDNS. There are different ways to do it, and some routers come with a DDNS service ready to go. DuckDNS is commonly recommended. There are even images like Cloudflare-DDNS, which allow you to run it in a container.
Maybe try to isolate the problems a bit and tackle one at a time. DDNS is only needed yo get to your router from the world wide web. Once you can resolve a name to your router’s changing public ip address you can continue to think about port forwarding in openWRT. Once you can forward incoming traffic to a host behind your router, let’s say port 80 to your nginx instance, then you can think about configuring nginx, let’s say mapping to different running docker containers depending on the name in the url … etc.
Firstly, use caddy. Fuck nginx and the rest. Pointless complexity
Just run nginx proxy manager, no need t manually touch the config if you don’t need complex stuff
Idk of any good series but techno Tim has a great video on using cloudflare and traefik to get wildcard letsencrypt ssls for your docker services.
