Hi everyone

Thanks for all the advice on buying a domain. Its a big week for me. Getting on grapheneos, buying a domain, and I also recently started self hosting my contacts and calendar. I love this way of life.

My original plan was to one of the xyz 1.1111b domains for $1 a year but most of the feedback I got said just go with cloudflare. Its a lot more money than I had planned but all the security features are baked in and I feel that’s worth the extra money.

Here are my questions. I use the latest version of truenas community

  1. How do I connect my domain to my server apps? I’ve got a series of apps I’d love to he able to access without tailscale and solely use the domain.
  2. I have heard the term DNS a million times but don’t really understand it. What do.I need to know about DNS to keep security up and stay protected
  3. I’d like to let family access my media server, are there any considerations I need to make?
  4. How can I use one domain to access multiple services on my server? Do I need to pay extra for subdomains?

Thank you for any advice

  • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    My general advice at this point is, if you haven’t already, to document the setup for your future self. It quickly gets out of hand with the amount of passwords, credentials, certificates, firewall settings, docker containers left and right, configs, workarounds, custom shell scripts, ansible scripts, git repos, backup locations and passwords, etc. Right now everything is fresh in your mind, but 6 months from now you may need to restore from a backup or an OS upgrade goes wrong, and then you’ll appreciate being able to remember the details.

  • Strider@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Someone has to say it: when you’re asking these questions it shows that you still have a lot to learn. That itself is fine.

    But you’re at significant risk when putting a service on the internet so it would be best maybe to have someone at your side to assist you with beginner mistakes.

    • philanthropicoctopus@thelemmy.clubOPEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Your not wrong. I guess that’s why I’m posting here, just trying to figure how what I’m doing and what it all means

      If you have any advice for learning I’ll definently look at it

      • Strider@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        4 months ago

        Hmm, I would propose setting things up in your LAN step by step. But it would take a long time.

        • setting up your own dns
        • setting up your own webserver

        It’s something someone experienced could make (poc style - proof of concept) in an hour or so, just to show how it works, but it’s a lot for a beginner.

        Still, you could start making a simple Webserver hosting a page and then setting up dns for it and pointing a client to the dna server and see how that works.

        It’s infinetly expandable.

    • Tangent5280@lemmy.worldEnglish
      02·
      4 months ago

      What is your opinion on using Claude or similar to cross check decisions for robustness? Yay or Nay?

      • Rekorse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        You won’t be able to tell if Claude is giving you good answers or not. You’d have to have someone who knows about this stuff check it for you, but at that point you should just have that person help you.

  • valkyre09@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Cloudflare tunnels is a great way to expose services on your network to the web.

    You run a program in your server, it makes a tunnel, then you configure it on the website to visit the internal link in your network, eg

    If you’re hosting a web server at home, you could have something like:

    www.mydomain.net > http://192.168.1.55:8080/

    You can also have cloudflare protect access to that website with email verification, google / Microsoft accounts etc.

    It’s a lot to learn, but it’s very handy once you get the hang of it.

    Here’s a YouTube video on the basics: https://youtu.be/Q5dG8g4-Sx0?is=J7KvNZoyjsEq33fO

    • philanthropicoctopus@thelemmy.clubOPEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Thank you for this tip

      I have just set it up and holy shit it worked straight away! This is so exciting!

      My question, now that my apps are exposed to the internet, aside from having strong passwords is there anything else I should be doing to keep safe?

      I just read no media servers on free tunnels so I’ll have to use nginx for jellyfin

      • Svinhufvud@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Using cloudflare tunnels means that the TLS is terminated at cloudflare. This means that cloudflare has the capability to snoop on your traffic, so you have trust cloudflare not to do that, especially if your traffic contains sensitive information.

        Also, the ‘no media in free tunnels’ is outdated information as far as I know, so be sure to check up to date information on that.