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A local caching DNS server can be useful and is easy to get set up. And learning about DNS gives you insight into one of the most important pieces of how the internet works. You can go as far as setting up your own root zone which means you have the needed components to run the entire internet (except for the bandwidth it would require).

I don’t see an apache or nginx server in your list, do you host your own websites? Get one of those set up, and then read about LetsEncrypt to creating and managing SSL certs.

There’s just so many other things you can run from home… Chat servers like IRC, instant messager services like XMPP via OpenFire, a local SMTP relay with postfix, file hosting under something like SeaFile. If you have a collection of music files you could even build your own internet radio station.

I’ve been wanting to set up NextCloud on my servers, but I’ve been busy trying to get all the OS upgrades caught up. One of these days…

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VelociCatTurd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Caddy is listed instead of Apache or ngoni. And it handles all of the SSL on its own.

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- Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Ah ok. There’s a ton of stuff on these lists that I’ve never heard of before, and since nobody is adding descriptions for the rest of us who aren’t familiar with the projects, I think there will be a lot of possibilities passed over in this post that might have otherwise been of interest.
  
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  - VelociCatTurd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I agree with you, I don’t know what a lot of that stuff is.
    
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    fraydabson@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah I was thinking of people giving me ideas didn’t even cross my mind people would use my list for ideas. Updated!
    
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  - fraydabson@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Didn’t think of that. Most eyes are probably already off this post but I’ll edit it with some descriptions !
    
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fraydabson@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Updated my apps to describe what I use them for. But it’s funny you mention this because as I switched away from cloudflare tunnels I was learning how to get all of it working with nginx proxy manager. Took me a while cause im a dns/ssl noob. But I learned a lot and then switched to caddy for its simplicity.

Now a local caching dns server is not something I’ve thought about before and while not something I’d probably need it would be a great learning experience.

I did learn a bit about lets encrypt but happy caddy handles it all for me now. I still need to learn more though because I need to do some tls verification skipping for some of my sites. The other ideas are cool too. Thanks !

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- Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Oh and thanks for updating the app descriptions, gives me more to look through!
  
  Seems like one of the features I read about for Nextcloud was that it could host a Zoom-like video conference… Am I remembering right? I keep thinking of setting that up because our model train club has a lot of older members that can’t attend in person and a paid subscription is out of our range.
  
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  - fraydabson@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I haven’t played with the Nextcloud chat apps yet so not too sure. But I’ve heard a lot of people talk about “Jitsi” and planned to look into it.
    
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    Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Thanks for the tip, I’ll check into that!
    
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- Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There’s a lot of options for local DNS caching. I think one of the easiest is dnsmasq which not only handles dns but also lets you set up a local DHCP service, and will automatically add local machine names to your DNS lookups. I use the DHCP side for my lan and wifi networks, and then put static IPs of my servers into the hosts files on that machine (which dnsmasq also reads) so everything on my network can easily be addressed by name.
  
  One of the benefits of a DNS cache is that it saves the wait time for lookups of sites you frequently visit (although your desktop may already provide this too). Another advantage is using local names when your various services need to reference each other. For instance if you have a database at a given IP, you could add that info to dnsmasq, point all your services to the name, and if you ever need to move the db to a different IP you only have to make one update to tell every other machine where it moved to.
  
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