Hello all fellow geeks!
Yeah I’m a proud geek!
After 2 or 3 weeks fiddling with making my own cloud at home, aka self hosted cloud,
and about to throw in the towel thinking, “I’m puny. I don’t have the skills for this! Give up buttercup!” …Knowing that my inner Yoda-nerd will never give up! I gave up on Google and other data harvester for a reason or five…
I ask this first:
Can I have anything on my LAN, on always on VPN, connect from outside via a domain name as xyzxyz.com??
My case:
I want to have my own “cloud” at home, for mainly share family photos with my family. Long story short, my mother and grandfather used a few summers, manually scanning 1000’s if not 10s of 1000’s pictures, all the way back to 1950s! As the family geek, I want to pay my respect to them 2, and offer to make a cloud for them, to share with the whole family.
I tested out TrueNAS Core, with NextCloud, and on my LAN, I love it! It have all the bells and whistles I want.
So I installed a physical server in the basement, with TrueNAS Core, and Nextcloud, copied over all pictures, and all is well.
Over the next 2-3 weeks, I follow between 20 and 50 different guides, on how to get this online.
Bought a domain, actually two, for two different providers, for trouble shooting reasons. Because… No matter what, none of my domains, connect to my home server…
What I have tried:
Both domains is now in Cludflare. Also because trouble shooting reasons.
The caveat if I cal call it… Is that my LAN is behind a pfSense box… ALL my LAN gadgets must go out of this house via VPN tunnels. Controlled by aliases. Gadgets not in correct alias, can’t exit this house.
Is THAT my problem??
Even though I have sat up DDNS for my Domains, Cloudflare get the correct IPS IP address for all my sub servers.
I have tried HAProxy clean. HAProxy with Virtial IP. Also in FW Rules, ALL ports open direct to my NextCloud server, still my xyzxyz.com addresses, with correct DDNS, with Challenges sat up, with Certs made through Acme certificates service. NOTHING helps!
I even installed a brand new bare metal Ubuntu Server, followed a guide to the dot, with install Nginx and Let’s encrypt bot.
Fail, fail fail. Can’t connect my server, Let’s encrypt bot can NEVER issue a cert, blaming this and that. I even open up for IPv6 in pfSense. No go!
Now that I wanted to say “GIVE UP, NERD!” In the shower, it hit me…
“Is it because my Server in the basement, is always on VPN???”
So I ask you gurus, that KNOW this stuff.
Must the server be off VPN, or do I have to make some special adjustment somewhere because my LAN Server is on a VPN?
ANY tips and tricks is highly appreciated!
Thank you for a very good lesson! 👍
Thanks to you, and a couple of others, pointing out that being behind a VPN makes it impossible for NAT/port forwarding work, I must figure out how to config my pfSense, to accept ONE address exit without VPN…
The challenge is that this pfSense box was sat up 4-5 years ago, following a “Bullet proof” way of making it 100% sure, no LAN connected gadgets have ANY IP leaks what so ever.
And it works TOO well, now I can’t figure out how to reconfig it… I’m not skilled enough.
I have skills just enough as a 35 year IT veteran, to follow that guide, but tinker it to make one IP escape, is not in my powers, yet!
Tried all tricks in my book, for let let’s say IP 10.0.0.201 exit this FW without a VPN, have been useless! Even in Rules LAN and WAN, giving that IP full access anywhere, and it can’t even ping google.com…
Apparently, I did (Or that VPN guide) a way too good job of securing this house hehe.
Normally I would be happy, but since I want to gift my mother with sharing family photos, same time as I don’t trust ANY online providers with privacy, “need” to self host this. And I am stuck as a n00b! :)
Thanks for trying to advice though