Host network and domain name at home

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What is this and why do I want it?

With Yunohost I can host my own services, at home. And I really like it. But it’s not enough. I also want to host my own network, and its corresponding domain name, at home. All of it configured to work together.

I want it first and foremost because it is fun. Also because I have a certain taste for a free and open Internet. And in that context I want to try something different than the paradigm where a user is expected to rely solely on third parties. So that is a kind of test to see how hard it is to reach a certain point of autonomy.

A word about the format of this how to. This is a work in progress. Meaning that it is not following the typical format of tutorials where the task is already done and detailed in a post.
I am in the process of doing this and due to the relative complexity of the task, I think I will rather detail the steps in different posts in this thread, over time. In this format I also want to make sure there is space for anyone to contribute if you can help in any way, or steer the whole thing in the right direction.
I hope this is ok with the forum guidelines. If not, please let me know.

So about the actual implementation, I think I will try to solve it as I go. But, more or less, that would look like this:

  • Yunohost installed on a tiny box (Raspberry / Olimex …) at home.
  • A block of public IPs for the box and the local network attached to it.
  • Authoritative name server (wikipedia) for the domain name, that automatically configures the network.

I already have a few building blocks I can start with:

  • For the routing part, I think I will start with the Brique Internet wifi hotspot application.
  • For the network part, I highly recommend checking out FFDN but for the moment I will use Hurricane Electric as a tunnel broker since I can set it up myself, for free, with reverse dns. But for the IPv4 part it can get tricky. And having a mail server on IPv6 only can make it hard to reach. And I believe the RFC for a DNS says it needs to have a v4 address, I will check that out.
  • I think Yunohost already includes a DNS and dhcp server. I will probably try to use it to configure the local network and the corresponding entries in the DNS.

I have no idea if anyone is interested by this setup, but I think I will work on it regardless. If you want to show interest you can like it, or contribute.

The next post should be about getting the network.

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Hi there,

that sounds like an interesting work :tada: ! I think some people might be interested about this. If I remember correctly, some people at some point wanted to be able to use YunoHost / Internet Cube without internet connectivity always on, and/or mostly for local network only, don’t know if that’s exactly related but there’s surely some overlap.

To be sure I understand correctly : you aim to have, for instance, domain names working only in local network with a DNS authority/server somewhere inside it ? (Not sure what you mean by ‘hosting your own network’)

I don’t have much experience with all this, but here’s a few points I’m thinking about :

  • Maybe have a look at .local domain names which are resolved differently from other names and might answer your need (but maybe not ;))
  • Probably one of the biggest issue you’ll encounter is that network nowadays are not happy with self-signed certificates, so you might run into warnings constantly about certificate not being trustable. Though you should be able to add exceptions or decide to not use HTTPS.
  • I’m not sure we have a DNS and DHCP server … we do have DNSmasq, but I’m not sure that it’s really a ‘regular’ DNS server. I’m even less sure about the DHCP part ;). But then again I’m a bit noob with this.

Feel free to come ask questions about this on the dev chat of Yunohost or La Brique !