Hello!!! <3
So i’m trying to host my own lil website server! I already got httpd on my fedora (GNU/Linux) device, forwarded the 80 port to my router and - TADA I can access my simple index.html site from anywhere now via the IPv4 address! I even tried it on my phone at work, and I was able to reach my home server!
I have now purchased some nice domain smorty.dev rather cheaply on porkbun but - as you may find out when clicking on the link - it doesn’t forward to my server yet ;(
I have already setup the A address record thingy on porkbun, which can even be verified by running ping smorty.dev in the terminal, as it retrieves the current IPv4 address of my router
**CODE BLOCK**
maria@fedora:~$ ping smorty.dev
PING smorty.dev (79.241.82.75) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from www.smorty.dev (79.241.82.75): icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=8.35 ms
64 bytes from www.smorty.dev (79.241.82.75): icmp_seq=2 ttl=63 time=6.53 ms
64 bytes from www.smorty.dev (79.241.82.75): icmp_seq=3 ttl=63 time=5.94 ms
^C
--- smorty.dev ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 5.937/6.937/8.345/1.024 ms
I searched online and found some people talking about a Windows HOSTS file, so I found the equivalent for GNU/Linux, which is /etc/hosts and that file now looks like this
**CODE BLOCK**
maria@fedora:~$ cat /etc/hosts
# Loopback entries; do not change.
# For historical reasons, localhost precedes localhost.localdomain:
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
# See hosts(5) for proper format and other examples:
# 192.168.1.10 foo.example.org foo
# 192.168.1.13 bar.example.org bar
79.241.82.75 www.smorty.dev
127.0.0.1 www.smorty.dev
Soooo there is clearly a connection there, but the actual forwarding in the browser to my website doesn’t seem to work ;(
I am *somewhat sure I exported this correctly…
**IMAGE OF ROUTER INTERFACE**
EDIT: I completely forgot to mention what the address records look like… and maybe they are kinda important for my problem sooo here they are!
**SCREENSHOT FROM ADDRESS RECORDS**
if someone here could share some advice maybe - that would be super great :)
I must have been doing websites wrong for decades by not forwarding through a reverse proxy. I admit a good one like caddy makes tls easy, but unless you have several backends for one site theres no need. The reverse proxy part of load balancer is very similar to a port forward, but on layer 7 instead of 3 or 4
I wouldn’t say you’re doing it wrong, but a reverse proxy allows you to not only have a specific domain to use and multiple backends, etc… but it also can translate to not needing to have a port open for every single service you run on the backend.
RP’s can certianly be a load balancer, but usually for home lab / selfhosted purposes, we don’t need a load balancer.
