Ok, I’ll share the ultimate guerilla-selfhosting challenge I can’t figure out yet: what if my internet connection is G5 prepaid sim card in the middle of the woods (it actually is)? Apparently, I do have IPv6 more or less stable (undocumented), but that’s kind of limiting at times. Seems barely possible, but!
The https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#network states:
The fiber connection itself is not necessary, especially if you keep your data footprint small, but a fixed IP adress is very handy.
which kind of implies someone figured out a way to get around it. Would someone share the trick?
DNS is the way around it. But, the caveat is that while you can update your DNS entry as often as you like, itll often be cached on intermediate servers for an unknown amount of time. Expect a downtime of anywhere from a few minutes to days everytime your address changes.
So how does this work then, I host DNS and it pushes my data to other DNS servers around the net every time my IP address changes? Can you share an example of how could be set up?
You run a dynamic DNS script. It reaches out to the DNS server (provided by whoever registers your domain name) every five minutes and says “my IP is x.x.x.x”.
The problem is that it takes a few minutes to update when it changes. That might not fit your use case.
No, typically you use the DNS server of the domain provider.
Hosting your own DNS server is possible, but if you don’t have a static IP address the other DNS servers will have no idea which server to ask when your IP changes, so in this specific scenario it wouldn’t work. And in general it isn’t really worth it as you get a DNS server with your domain included.