How to self-host servers in your living room on static IPs

Summary

Return to index Article published by: Leah Rowe Date of publication: 29 November 2022 Most people assume that a router is a piece of hardware, but that’s not true. The router is actually software, and the hardware is just what that software runs on. Almost anything can be a router, just like anything can be on a cob in that one episode of Rick and Morty. The laptop in the photo is my router, configured in exactly the way this guide describes. Have you ever wanted to host a server at home or in your office, but you can’t because the ISP won’t give you static IPs? Are you behind a CGNAT? This guide is for you. It will teach you how to route static IPv4 and (native) IPv6 addresses to your network, with hosts directly pingable on the internet and all ports open. With this guide, you won’t need to host your software project on github anymore, because you can instead install gitea/cgit with a mailing list on your raspberry pi and host it in your basement or living room! I recently moved libreboot.org hosting to a much faster network than what it had before, but the new ISP doesn’t assign static IPv4 or IPv6 subnets on the line, and it has all kinds of restrictions, though speed, uptime and latency are all excellent. I decided therefore to set up a tunnel connection using Andrews & Arnold Ltd (A&A) L2TP tunnel service. This is basically similar to most VPN services, but you get a lot more freedom and flexibility e.g. IPv4 subnets (for example, you could host your own DNS on this). It could also just be used for normal day to day internet tasks. A&A provide you with an unfiltered service, unshaped and unthrottled in any way. Brief technical overview[link] Adapt this guide according to your distro. Basically all we want to do is do PPP via L2TP and enable packet forwarding in Linux, so that packets can pass between two interfaces. We then set routes. We will have these interfaces: WAN port (ethernet) - upstream ISP tunnel port (ppp over l2tp) - physically via WAN port LAN po...