Need VPN to connect to my home services from my home network

I’ve got a weird networking behavior on my home network and I can’t find any answers online.
I’ve a home server with different services running on it : Nextcloud, Plex …
I got a domain name on Namecheap and created the necessary records.
Everything works fine except when I am at home, if I try to connect using the domain name from my home network I get a “This site can’t be reached” message.

I think there’s a setting to change in my router, but I can’t figure out which one it is.

You probably need to put a DNS Record into your Router that points at your Servers.

It could be something else too, but you didn’t give enough information about how your networking is set up to make a good suggestion besides the DNS Record.

This will need some more elaboration.

When you ping the domain, is it giving you your homes external IP?

Yes when I ping my domain name it returns my home external IP address. My home set up is pretty simple, just a classic modem/router (comtrend). The thing that I don’t understand is that if I’m at work for example, I can connect without any problems.

its probably trying to loop around weirdly. Either add entries into your router’s DNS/redirects (if available), or edit your host file on your machine to point to the internal IP.

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I was hoping to avoid the hosts file tinkering, but I can’t find DNS/redirects anywhere on my router.

could always set up a pihole on your home server.

Got one, but it won’t fix the https:// requirement for some service and testing sadly

So some insight into my home network.

I have a pihole server and a server dedicated to just being a proxy.
The proxy handles the https requests internally and point to my internal network services, that way I only change the cert once.

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What Router do you have?

It’s a Comtrend adsl router (still waiting for fiber sadly) it’s a generic home router with nothing fancy as far as options go.

I should look into creating a proxy server, what software do you use?

Nginx.

Here is a place to get started.

The Legend has definitely gone beyond what I’m willing to do. Rather than copy everything in it, try to see what you can make of it and use it as a starting point. After that, you should start asking questions if you start to stumble.

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:joy: Well ill take that joke as a sign of good faith

This. Cant emphasize it enough. Most of the time the question is answered by doing whats in the guide rather than asking before doing. :slight_smile: I wont hesistate to answer something you are stuck on after that though. (time willing)

Thanks for the link, I think I’ll be able to get it working after some good old try and error!

The router is probably either not forwarding packets coming from internal network onto the external IP, or it’s forwarding them but not SNAT-ing them, so the server on the internal network is replying to the client directly and client is going “wtf, I expected a TCP ack from <public_ip>, I don’t know what you ack from an internal IP is about”


If you have IPv6 at home, (your ISP doesn’t matter), you can try setting up a AAAA record on namecheap in addition to IPv4 A record.

This will eventually work because of Happy Eyeballs, albeit not perfectly.

Don’t use long TTLs while setting things up, 60s tops.


Another thing you can try is a VPN, as you mentioned for example try installing Tailscale, with it you don’t really need namecheap thanks to MagicDNS.


Since you say your router/modem is pretty meh, consider getting an OpenWRT compatible router… I wouldn’t recommend either a Unifi or a Mikrotik router (too inflexible), not any vendor software. pfSense might be ok, but it’s overkill, needs a bigger machine orba $200 SG-1100, so not ideal. Bonus: with OpenWRT you get various fancy queuing or queue management policies that can help keep your latencies low.

If you have an old pi and a USB ethernet dongle, that might work well enough as a router on DSL speeds - if you have something else let us know.


Another option, you could turn your server into your router/gateway for hosts on your network by installing a DHCP/DNS server alongside whatever you have installed. Obviously this makes it a single point of failure for your own.

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maybe its router issue!

Thanks for the Proxy server idea, a simple squid server fixed my problem.