I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.

Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.

I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can’t communicate with each other.

I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don’t anticipate a crush of people.

I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I’ve successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.

I’m not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that’s it.

Anything else I should know? Thanks!

EDIT:

I also have a domain, a couple of them, actually. They’re like potato chips; you can’t stop at just one.

I don’t plan on self-hosting email used for forum registration and announcements. I’m not a masochist.

  • CapitalNumbers@lemm.eeEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    just cloudflare tunnel it - i set one up the other day and it works super well, proving external access to a locally hosted service all without having to set up your own SsL certs and worrying about exposing private ips or ports

    • early_riser@lemmy.radioOPEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      I looked up Cloudflare tunnels and tried setting one up. Some things future readers may want to know:

      1. You have to set Cloudflare as your domain’s authoritative nameservers.
      2. You need to set up an account (not a problem) but also have to register a payment method, even for the free tier (no me gusta).
      3. Regarding NodeBB specifically, if you set up a tunnel, you can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but it fails when you try to log in. A few minutes of searching leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets, and the solution requires you to partially expose your IP address, defeating the principle purpose for me to use cloudflare in the first place.