Ask HN: Are there reverse-proxy providers for my use case?

2 points by gazzini 4 years ago | 3 comments

I want to run web-servers from home, with public DNS, but I'm worried that my IP address will change. I'm willing to pay in the range of $100 / month for some sort of proxy, and I only need about 98% uptime.

Is there some sort of service, similar to ngrok[0], that will: a) have a consistent IP address that I can point a DNS at b) forward all requests (maybe some weird ports / protocols) over some tunnel to my local machines c) let my local machines re-establish the tunnels across restarts

Context:

I don't _need_ to do this. I just want to.

I have 3 Intel NUC[1] boxes at home, on battery backup, hard-wired to two residential fiber internet connections for redundancy (Google Fiber & AT&T).

One of these is an Ethereum validator[2], which has been successfully running for almost a year now. It's had ~98% uptime, which is good enough for my needs.

I'm interested in helping other proof-of-stake networks grow, and they all have different hardware & networking requirements. In particular, one of them requires a public DNS entry for each of my nodes.

I sort-of like the idea that the networks are more "decentralized" when running in my house vs in a datacenter somewhere... But honestly, I just think it's more fun to own the machines (pets, not cattle[3]).

[0]: https://ngrok.com/ [1]: https://www.newegg.com/intel-blknuc7i7dnk1e/p/N82E16856102205?Item=9SIA2F873V9947 [2]: https://beaconscan.com/validator/0xaf21b320e306f2e932748403cc4c0a8a8fc78bcf2ccabbc3f04f7242cc7448ba5cc2995267d68d134ca8fa63e6256113 [3]: http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/

ohiovr 4 years ago |

This might not be what you are looking for but might solve your problem: https://www.dynu.com/

Dynu has free services for cheap subdomains but they also have a fairly decent registry too. I was even able to set up a mail domain (of course useless because of IP blacklists). I used a reverse proxy to provide SSL to my hosted domains. I set it all up with Docker and bash.

I had quite a few fun little services running at home on my pc. Never seemed to find a use for it though.

gazzini 4 years ago | |

This looks awesome!

So, rather than proxying requests from some server, I can use their dynamic ip product to just auto-update the DNS entry for my home computers whenever my ISP changes my DNS.

I imagine there will be some small downtime every time my ISP switches (cached DNS / TTL etc...), but it should happen rarely ().

I'll also search for "dynamic DNS" and see if anything else comes up, but this looks like a really good solution, thanks for posting it.

ohiovr 4 years ago | | |

Your welcome! BTW I found my ip address changed very rarely. dynu gives you a linux daemon that will allow you to notify your services. I might get one ip change every 4 months unless I'm changing my mac address on the router.