• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • So i had done this (with Adguard rather than pihole) and i think i was getting caching issues. Whether or not i was, though, i removed it and it looks like my router is handling it all just fine without the rewrite on the local DNS server.

    Some folks mentioned “hairpin NAT” - i was reading the wiki on NAT last night but didnt get to hairpin, but that appears to be what is happening.

    The conclusion is - my setup had been doing what i want the whole time without any DNS fiddling. I updated the original post with the speedtests.









  • For a domain name:

    You go to something like NameCheap.org and buy a name (hackers4life.xyz or something cool like that). Then their web interface has a place for you to enter the IP address that you want associated with that name. Whenever someone then types “hackers4life.xyz” there will br a series of computers asking other computers “do you know the IP address for this?” until they do.

    If you have that Pi in your house, there are (at least) two steps for you then: (1) Getting your home IP address (2) Forwarding the port

    (1) Your router admin panel may have this, or else if you search the web for “what is my ip” there are sites that will tell you (basically, you connect to their webpage and they just print out the IP they are sending data back to). There are two concerns here, though.

    (a) Do you have a unique IP? There arent enough IPv4 addresses in the world for all the computers connecting to the internet. To get around this, ISPs will essentially group customers together under the same IP and then they figure out how to get the traffic to the right place. If you dont have a unique IP, you might be screwed (but i havent looked into dealing with that much).

    (b) If you have a unique IP, you still probably dont have a stable IP. Your ISP might reallocate all the addresses in their network every day/week/month/whenever. This is the case for me. Namecheap (or whatever other domain vendor) has a process for you to use a script to send them your IP address, and so you make a script to recheck it and send namecheap updates every hour or something like that.

    (2) Forwarding the port

    Some other machine on the web knows your IP (because it is associated with hackers4life.xyz) and so they try to connect. This comes down the wire from the street into the side of your house/apartment, into the modem, and into your router. If your router isnt expecting it (or prepared to do something with it), itll just ignore it. You want the router to instead send it to your Pi. To do this, you go to your router’s admin settings and forward the messages based on the port they are coming in on. The standard ports for HTTP and HTTPS are 80 and 443, and so you can forward those ports to the Pi. Making sure that then the Pi does the right things with those is outside the scope of me writing right now.




  • I turned off QoS and immediately am getting 930 on speedtest.net from the desktop browser!

    Also, very helpful to know Issue 1 here. I assumed that the router would be the best spot to test since it is farthest upstream (other than the modem). I didn’t know it could pass traffic faster than it can decode, but that makes sense that people would have tried to make that the case. The router is still getting ~500 Mbps while the browser is much closer to the full 1000.






  • That is the correct question, and mostly no, I don’t have any specific problem.

    The biggest motivator for me looking at it is probably just hobby/interest/how-does-this-work.

    That said, my partner and I both work from home ~50% and are often pulling files/data that are a couple GB from the work network, and having those go faster would be nice. Probably the limiting factor in those, though, is the upload from the work network and so faster download for us likely wouldn’t matter, but I’d like to be able to say “I looked into it, honey.”