Are you able to ask your ISP customer service to set up port forwarding for you?

At minimal you want HTTP (Port 80) but you probably want HTTPS (443) as well. If you’re hosting DNS as well you will need port 53 too.

Have those ports routed to the “inside” IP of the machine you want to use, and the rest of it is basically just setting up the webserver (and possibly DNS) to serve your domain.

NB: While on the phone with your ISP, ask them what the DHCP lease time is. Ideally you want a static IP for your setup.

Ok, so I must’ve misunderstood the question, because to me it seems OP already has all the necessary ingredients to bake this dish. And yet, the vast majority of comments recommend various 3rd party services which is the complete opposite of selhosting.
Fire up nginx/apache2, and all good, no? What am I missing?

They can be. Some motherboards come with one built in. But in most cases it refers to its own PCIe card, such as one of the many models from LSI Megaraid.

The advantage of this is that it can have a small capacitor bank (or a proper battery) to provide emergency power so that if something stupid happens such as motherboard failure, the raid controller will use this power to cleanly write to the disks.

EDIT: I just remembered one such stupid situation at work where a motherboard died and then the entire system blacked out, including power to the drives. I spoke with my vendor since data loss and corruption carries a hefty price tag in my field. They told me not to worry - The data could sit in the buffer for ages, as the capacitor bank was there to handle things like this. Turned out that upon restoring power, once the array was online again, the write buffer will be written to disk. No CPU or motherboard required - the controller took care of it. This was especially handy since it took a little longer to find a replacement board.

Ooh, I did this a while back, except it was hardware Raid5 to Raid6. Turns out one of the servers in a cluster were, for some reason, set up with 11 disks in raid5 + hot spare, except for raid 6 on all raids on all servers. Took me embarrassingly long to realize why storage space was as expected despite one disk being reported as not in an array.

Storcli and a nice raid controller makes thinks like this easy, as long as you grab enough coffee and read the storcli syntax while taking notes to build the full command string.

The generally don’t containerize things because I’m too old and crusty, but segregating over several users is basically how it’s been done for ages, and while it may not be particularly useful in your case, I consider it a reasonable best practice that costs you nothing.

bash setup/config/PS1 is your friend here. I frequently find myself with a myriad of terminals between a bunch of usernames and servers at work, and setting up a proper prompt is key to help you keep track.

My bashrc makes my prompt look like this:

username@hostname:/absolute/path
$ inputgoeshere

… with color coding, of course. Yes, I use a multiline prompt. I somehow never saw that before using ParrotSec despite being a bash user for 25 years. I modified the ParrotSec default to suit my needs better, and I like it:

• Obvious which user I am.
• Obvious which host I’m on.
• Obvious which path I’m in.
• It’s easy to copy and paste a complete source/destination for pasting into, for example, an rsync comman

I pasted my PS1 config here: https://pastebin.com/ZcYwabfB

Stick that line near the bottom of your ~/.bashrc file if you want to try it out.

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Those are directory listings. They are the default in apache2 (maybe others as well… I only know apache2), unless disabled or disallowed in the configs (enabled and allowed by default). If the directory you’re accessing such as http://192.168.123.123/somedir/ does not contain a default file, such as an index.html, the directory list will be served instead.

It’s way too late at night for me to give an in-depth answer, but I just wanted to let you know that if you plan on adding drives over time, you might want to check out running the disks in JBOD instead of RAID and the use ZFS to create the storage volume. Redundancy supported, and you can add disks whenever you need more space. The disks don’t even have to be the same size.

Thank you. I help where I can.

I was considering something similar for my Volvo 940 about around 2010. The idea was that I’d install a touch screen as an infotainment system where I could see stuff like OBD2 data and navigation.

While not having a functioning speedometer for a little bit (later fixed), I used my phone to see the GPS speed with the screen flipped so I could get the speed on the windshield like a HUD in some modern cars. The plan was to do something similar integrated with the home brewed infotainment.

It annoys me that I never went through with it, because so much stuff of what I’d drawn up became standard for “fancy” cars later.

Pssst, take these: .,

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Anything that does the job is good enough. At its core a server is just a regular PC with a dedicated purpose and software. Sure, there are specialized hardware better suitable and purpose built, but it’s not a requirement.

I for one prefer 19" rackmount stuff with disk bays in the front, but that’s more of a convenience than anything.

UPS is nice, but it’ll work without it.

I’ve had to deal with the Brazilian computer market and how it’s ridiculously overpriced due to import fees, so in your situation I’d just get any hand-me-down computer. Servers generally don’t require much unless you’re doing something special or intensive.

Get your hands on whatever you can find for free or dirt cheap (laptop or desktop doesn’tmatter), install linux, and you have a basic setup that you can work with. If your use case requires more, then that’s something you can accommodate in the next iteration of your server.

To anyone in my jury: I just got back from the store and realized I had forgotten something. I’ll live without it.

A huge tape archive in a mountain. It’s pretty standard for geophysical data. I have some (encrypted) personal stuff on a few tapes there.

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Yes. China’s great firewall mostly handles content filtering and deals with low hanging fruit. Getting around it is fairly simple, and the censorship is mostly focused on stuff that would otherwise be easily accessible by the broader population.

VPN is your obvious choice here. CCP blocks most public VPN providers, so you’d have to roll your own.

You can set up a VPN concentrator somewhere in the world, and you would be able to reach it. As far as I’ve noticed, they don’t block VPN as a whole, and default port should work fine - the reason for this is probably that VPN has many commercial uses that they don’t want to harm.

Source: I run a (work-related) VPN accessible from inside china.

I hear the API development for alpha centauri is pretty far behind its peer.

Note: I have not done any research on the topic, but I’m just theorizing based on what I already know, as it’s an interesting mental excersice.

Obviously the biggest problems will be uplink and power. Solar and a battery bank is the obvious choice, but other methods of powers can also work, such as a small generator in a river, etc.

Lead acid batteries are relatively cheap, and building a 12V bank out of car batteries makes sense as there is plenty of off the shelf hardware available to invert or transform 12V into whatever you need. Charging it from solar will be inefficient, but it will work, and there is also plenty of hardware for this (tip: boat-related shops can help you out here)

As for hosting hardware we’re of course dealing with the constraints of load vs power consumption. If you can go for something like a raspberry pi zero, you can run for days off of a single car battery with those cheap 5v cigarette-pkug chargers. If you need something more powerful, you need to scale up power accordingly.

As for uplink, the question is “How much” off grid we’re talking. I will assume that there’s at least GPRS coverage that you can connect to with a 4G modem, even if you don’t get 4G speeds. Plenty of off-the-shelf hardware available here. If not applicable, just substitute with whatever is available, be it CDMA, packet radio, starlink (eww), or anything else.