Fort Collins Connexion comments for home servers?

blc blc+nclug at mail.vanade.com
Sat Feb 18 19:27:13 UTC 2023


So, I'm hearing a lot of people giving up their home static IPs and going 
to remote hosted machines.  I just don't feel ready to do that at least 
at the moment, it feels weird when "my" machine isn't at home with me to 
work with for whatever reason.  I also don't have access to a free colo 
so that will be an additional expense for that machine and ipaddr 
allocation, granted it's probably less than renting a static from 
Connexion.

But yes, email is a concern.  I have too many services sending back to my 
personal machine and would likewise be a pain to change all those 
services I use my home server for email, plus going back to depending on 
another email hop.  However a good point about blacklisted ISPs are out 
there, I don't know how bad Connexion's customers are in general at trying 
to send spam/hack other people.  After years of running my machines I've 
built up huge blacklists of machines and would hate to end up being on a 
subnet that I've blacklisted.

The network trouble I've been heavily trying to avoid after all these 
years and finally stopping is having to lie about my hostname when 
forwarding packets through the router to my server.  This should not be 
much different than dealing with port forwarding on a router appliance.  I 
actually was doing this way back when when I was stuck with NAT and 
breathed a sigh of relief when finally getting static and not having to do 
anymore.  Will I (have to) go back?

I got IPV6 mostly working with Centurylink 6RD which actually wasn't too 
bad.  I had a "native" "IPV6" DSL modem for a while that did 
the 6RD but it died, and was able to replicate 6RD on two other routers 
(pfsense, and Linux) so this will be a bit depressing giving this up. 
Also I'll miss having multiple /56's but I don't think I could ever use a 
single /56, hah.  Unfortunately CL does not have capabilty to reverse-DNS 
my IPV6 addresses apparently, and I suspect that Connexion would have the 
same problems trying to reverse IPV6 too.

Going without static just feels so much like a step back in time, going 
back to dynamic IP at home.  Back then, I always had my router crash on me 
for whatever reason; ever since I went to the /29 the crashes dropped down 
a lot to almost never, and when it did crash or when I accidently jostle 
the wall wart, I could reboot it and all my connections would be retained, 
the way IP was supposed to work.  While I hope that new routers including 
nokia's would not crash, temporary power loss would still affect it.

Anyway thanks for the responses.  It sounds like bridge mode is working 
for some people with Connexion but reverse-DNS is still an open question. 
Will have to continue to think about this, hopefully not too 
long.  Still looking out for more ideas and observations about the 
service!


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