I’ve been following this community for some time in order to learn about self-hosting and, while I have learnt about a bunch of cool web services to host, I’m still lost on where/how to start. Does anyone have, like, a very beginner guide that is not just “install this distro and click these buttons”? I have an old laptop that runs Arch (btw), but I’m not familiar with networking at all. So anything starting from “you can check your IP address using ip a” would be appreciated.

More specifically, I have a domain that I want to point to an old laptop of mine (I intend to switch to a VPS if/when I feel like the laptop is starting to lose it). How do I expose my laptop to the internet for this to work (ideally without touching my router, because I’ll be traveling quite a bit with my laptop and don’t mind the occasional downtime). I assume that once I’m able to type my domain name on my mobile and see it open anything from my laptop, I can then setup all the services I want via nginx, but that’s step 2. I tried to follow a few online guides but, like I mentioned, they’re either too simplistic (no I don’t want to move to Ubuntu Server just for this) or too complex (no I don’t know how DHCP works).

Thanks in advance

  • Johannes JacobsEnglish
    9•1 year ago

    It depends on what you want, but here is where i started:

    I watched a lot of youtube videos about opensource software. Then i got a nice second hand server that was quiet and didnt use too much power. I installed ProxMox on it instead of VMware (opensource) and then i slowly started to build VM’s for whatever i wanted to selfhost.

    A very important aspect that a lot of users ignore is security. You need to keep everything up to date. Follow sites with regards to your software (you can aelfhost freshrss. So thats a nice start) and keep “up” with cybersecurity.

    These days i have a small server with Alpine installed on it. Since most my selfhosted things now come in docker. If you go that way, learn yourself everything anout docker and docker compose. Compose is a really powerful tool once you work with docker!

    • Goddard GuryonOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      I’ve been putting off learning docker for a while now, guess it’s finally time to dive right into it. Thanks for the info about freshrss, I’d been looking for ways to get more into cybersecurity and this might be it

      • Johannes JacobsEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        I’m not at home now, but i will try to remember to post you some links to rss feeds i follow :-)