Fort Collins Connexion comments for home servers?

[Zak Smith]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2023 at 12:27:13PM -0700, blc wrote:
> 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

I used to have a FRII static IP, many years ago.  At my current place,
I have Xfinity, and will add Connexion when the road construction is
finally done.

While it's true that I technically don't have a static IP with
Xfinity, it is pretty much static.  By that I mean it changes almost
never-- maybe when my modem MAC changes or something like that.  For
stuff like ssh'ing in while at work or on the road, it's basically the
same as having a static IP.  For services such as an mxrecord, it's
not "the same enough", I agree.

The hybrid/VPN solution is not equivalent to just going to remote
hosted machines or cloud services-- it's just providing a fixed/cheap
endpoint on the public internet because ISP's are often loathe to
offer actual fixed IP's and sometimes block ports, etc.

The advantage of having a linode (a "nanode" starts at $5/mo) or other
vps or colo type machine to host a VPN and forward packets back is
that you are now independent of both ISP changes and the physical
location changes of your "home machine."  Your ISP can go defunct, you
can move across town or across the country, you can put the machine at
your "work office", whatever.  It also offers up options like having
virtual machines running in the VPN domain and then being able to
migrate them between sites while public-IP services/visibility remains
the same.

Having moved households a couple times while self-hosting my own
stuff, it is a huge pain to coordinate the ISP and IP changes to limit
downtime.  With a VPN client machine using a hosted "redirect", the
only downtime is really carrying the machine to the new place and
plugging it into the new DSL/Cable/Fi modem.


Hope this helps
Zak


--
Zak Smith
307-543-7820 office
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