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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Hmm, my understanding was that FQDN means that anyone will resolve the domain to e.g. the same IP address? Which is the case here (unless DNS rebinding mitigations or similar are employed) — but it doesn’t resolve to the same physical host in this case since it’s a private IP. Wikipedia:

    A fully qualified domain name is distinguished by its lack of ambiguity in terms of DNS zone location in the hierarchy of DNS labels: it can be interpreted only in one way.

    In my example, I can run nslookup jellyfin.myexample.com 8.8.8.8 and it resolves to what I expect (a local IP address).

    But IANA network professional by any means, so maybe I’m misusing the term?



  • If you have your own domain name+control over the DNS entries, a cute trick you can use for Jellyfin is to set up a fully qualified DNS entry to point to your local (private) IP address.

    So, you can have jellyfin.example.com point to 192.168.0.100 or similar. Inaccessible to the outside world (assuming you have your servers set up securely, no port forwarding), but local devices can access.

    This is useful if you want to play on e.g. Chromecast/Google TV dongle but don’t want your traffic going over the Internet.

    It’s a silly trick to work around the fact that these devices don’t always query the local DNS server (e.g., your router), so you need something fully qualified — but a private IP on a public DNS record works just fine!









  • My method:

    VPS with reverse proxy to my public facing services. This holds SSL certs, and communicates with home network through WireGuard link configured on my router.

    Local computer with reverse proxy for all services. This also has SSL certs, and handles the same services as the VPS, so I can have local/LAN speeds. Additionally, it serves as a reverse proxy for all my private services, such as my router/switches/access point config pages, Jellyfin, etc.

    No complaints, it mostly just works. I also have my router override DNS entries for my FQDN to resolve locally, so I use the same URL for accessing public services on my LAN.




  • Another fun trick you can play is to use a private IP on your public DNS records. This is useful for Jellyfin on Chromecast for instance — it uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS lookup (and ignores your router settings), so it wants a fully qualified domain name. But it has no problem accessing local hosts, so long as it’s from 8.8.8.8’s record.


  • I have set up local DNS entries (with Pi-Hole) to point to my srrver, but I don’t know if it possible to get certs for that, since it is not a real domain.

    So long as your certs are for your fully qualified domain there’s no problem. I do this, as do many people — mydoman.com is fully qualified, but on my own network I override the DNS to the local address. Not a problem at all — DNS is tied to the hostname, not the IP.



  • I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

    Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

    This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).