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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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.
Seems like you know what you need to study. I’d suggest searching for the topics and reading. Don’t try to skim, there is a lot to read and learn but it will be worth it, it will open many doors for you. Tutorials in this domain have usually an issue that following a track to achieve something the author can’t really explain everything on the path to the depth because, well, it would be lots of reading anyway and it would end up to be documentation rather than tutorial.
What I tend to do, it may or may not help you, depends on your individual way of learning, is I search for a topic to find some good article. Takes time, but then, usually, after the read I have more things from the article I need to understand more. This sort of branching leads to a good wholesome of a knowledge. In the past I used to skim a lot, which resulted in a lots of trial and error instances, eventually it lead to frustration from not knowing what the heck I was doing. When I realized reading and understanding should not really be skipped/skimmed, I started learning a lot.
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
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.
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.
Check FUTO’s guide. It’s great for beginners:
- Part 1: https://youtu.be/Et5PPMYuOc8
- Part 2: https://youtu.be/3fW9TV1WQi8
Sounds like you should just explore TCP, IP, subnetting, routing, and DNS on their own, not necessarily from the perspective of self-hosting.
I find Wikipedia to be a great source for learning new topics. I know you asked for videos, but you can still give it a shot. Plus you can take detours while reading about a topic by clicking on links in the article. This gives a more well-rounded understanding IMO.
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.
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.
@theit8514 @anticonnor I tried to watch one of his videos (it was 20 minutes ) after the first two minutes in before he actually provided any facts. I think it got a bit better. But in terms of starting out with selfhosting I’m not sure where I would start in his videos.
Studying computer science / Cybersecurity certainly helped. Besides that, trial and error for me.
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.
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.
@Nephalis @anticonnor I think there are two approaches. 1) Start with desktop linux, a vps or raspberrypi to start building linux and networking skills or;
2) start with something more packaged that provides more guidance on delivering services ‘out of the box’ like yunhost - which can provide some things off the rack services and with a templated approach - that then allows you to play around a bit while you learn the basics@Nephalis @anticonnor Yunohost has a starting point for setting up an instance - yunohost.org/#start @elena is also writing something up.
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.
