Perhaps this is a weird question I have, but I’ve been watching some technotim videos lately and he seems to have local dns addresses for local services. Perhaps I’ve got this wrong, but if not: how would you go over doing this?
I have a pterodactyl dashboard, which I access locally using the machines IP and the port, but it would be great to have a pterodactyl.example.com domain, which isn’t accessible from other networks, but does work on my own network. I also still want some services exposed to the internet, so I’m not sure if this would work.
Run your own DNS server on your network, such as Unbound or pihole. Setup the overrides so that domain.example.lan resolves to a local IP. Set your upstream DNS to something like 1.1.1.1 to resolve everything else. Set your DHCP to give out the IP of the DNS server so clients will use it
You don’t need to add block lists if you don’t want.
You can also run a reverse proxy on your lan and configure your DNS so that service1.example.lan and service2.example.lan both point to the same IP. The reverse proxy then redirects the request based on the requested domain name, whether that’s on a separate server or on the same server on a different port.
You can just point your domain at your local IP, e.g. 192.168.0.100
If you mean to do that in the public DNS records please note that public records that point at private IPs are often filtered by ISP’s DNS servers because they can be used in web attacks.
If you don’t use your ISP’s DNS as upstream, and the servers you use don’t do this filtering, and you don’t care about the attacks, carry on. But if you use multiple devices or have multiple users (with multiple devices each) eventually that domain will be blocked for some of them.
Yup, I have a domain I purchased and on my lan I use PiHole and Caddy. All my apps and services use the format app.mydomain.com. PiHole forwards all requests for *.mydomain.com to Caddy, which handles the LE certificate (via DNS challenge) and forwards the requests to the proper IP:PORT. I started using this for everything, my Proxmox hosts, printer, my APs…
You can do that with pihole and basically any reverse proxy. The process is the same, so you can follow tutorials, you just have to set up your domain through your pihole instance instead of a registrar. You can set pihole as your dns for specific devices, or you can set it as the default dns for your network through the router.
People already talked about hosting your own DNS, let me add that a reverse proxy would be used for something like mapping myhome.local:8000 to myhome.local/jellyfin.
Generally speaking, a subdomain like jellyfin.myhome.com will work out much better than a subpath like myhome.com/jellyfin.
Very few web apps can deal well (or at all) with being used under a subpath.
Using reverse proxies is common enough now that quite a few apps can deal with subpaths, and for the ones that can’t you can generally get nginx to rewrite the paths for you to make things work.
