Unlimiting Home Servers

Ever been frustrated that you can’t access your home server remotely? I definitely have! In the past few weeks I decided to set up my own NAS (Network Attached Storage) server and spent hours pulling my hair out because I couldn’t access my server remotely. Now I knew this wasn’t possible because of the way home networks work, but I could not get tools like NGINX or ngrok to work. But how did I fix it?

What’s the Problem?

“What’s the problem?” That's what someone asked me when they sensed my frustration. In short, I can’t access my server remotely. I had two options, I could accept the problem and call it a loss, or I could dive deeper and find a fix. I chose option number two.

Understanding IPs

This problem goes deeper than a networking configuration, but starts at how IP addresses work. An IP, Internet Protocol, is a set of rules dictating the format of data sent via the internet or a local network. Every device that connects to the internet, gets their own IP address. An IP address is a set of four numbers like 192.168.1.46. IP addresses can range from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. There are many different types of IP addresses, we will be looking into just Private and Public IP addresses.

Private IP Address

As mentioned above, every device that connects to your network has their own IP. Through all the devices that you have on your network, your router needs a way to identify them all. This is done by assigning an IP to it. At home, this is usually a private IP. These IPs are only visible and accessible in your network. For example, you have a NAS server running upstairs. You can access the management interface when you’re connected to the same WiFi network, but once you switch to the guest WiFi, it’s no longer accessible.

Public IP Address

The second type of IP we are looking into is a public IP Address. This is an IP that can be accessed from anywhere in the world no matter what network you are on. For example, each year I pay for a VPS. That VPS is assigned a public IP by the company I rent the server from. If I were to host a management panel on that IP, by typing in that IP in the URL bar of my browser, I would see my management panel. Additionally, each router has their own IP assigned to them by your ISP. If I were to navigate to my router’s public IP, I would be processed by the configured rules and DNS records to get where I need to be. Usually you can’t see this happen. Some ISPs show your admin console on the public IP (if this is the case, I recommend turning off outside access for security).

Fixing the Problem

So with that in mind, there really is only one way to fix this problem. I know my ISP offers DNS in its admin console so let's use that! In my Cloudflare DNS, I make an A record, nas.example.com that points to my router’s public IP. Then inside my router’s DNS configuration I make a rule that directs requests coming from nas.example.com to my NAS server’s private IP (something like 192.168.0.10). Then, with port forwarding setup correctly, if I navigate to nas.example.com, I should get my NAS’s web management interface.

Multiple Services

This works fine, however I have multiple services running inside my NAS server. I also have Nextcloud that I want to be able to access. For this I use Nginx. Nginx is a reverse proxy that directs all your traffic to the correct server. Nginx is fairly simple to set up. What I did was the following:

Keep my Cloudflare configuration the same as above (DNS A record that points to my router’s public IP)
Change my router’s DNS to point to the private IP of my Nginx instance
Setup Nginx to redirect all requests to the correct private IP of the corresponding server. (nextcloud.example.com to my nextcloud server’s IP, NAS management interface to my NAS’s server IP)

Conclusion

In conclusion, by understanding the nuances of IP addresses and harnessing tools like Cloudflare DNS and Nginx, the barriers to remote access of home servers have been effectively dismantled. Through strategic configuration and the use of reverse proxies, accessing multiple services remotely is now seamless. This problem has taught me many things about networking and home servers and I hope it has helped you unlock your home server.

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