Ask HN: How would you expose local Raspberry PI to Internet without third party?

by rohan1024 on 7/13/2019, 2:23 PM with 6 comments

I want to expose it to Internet because once that happens I can think of quite a few possibilities that would open up. I am listing some here of the top of my head:

1. Host a blog

2. Host a small private social network

3. Connect to my personal media server, streaming services, file server.

4. Monitor "smart" home. Car and other home utilities should be able to feed data into this PI.

5. Host alternate services for Google Keep, Calendar, etc,.

Currently my PI sits behind a NAT and can't be access through web. But I think it should be possible to access it form outside because my BitTorrent client works flawlessly. Can we create a similar PI network for discovery of other PIs and make them accessible from Internet? How would we go about building such a network?

  • by jolmg on 7/16/2019, 12:47 AM

    Host it on IPv6? I've never tried it, but I would think that it's just a matter of opening a hole in your home router's firewall. I don't think any ISP is doing dynamic IPv6, or at least I hope they're not, so your Raspberry PI should always have the same global IPv6 address.

    Anyway, this is one of the principal points of IPv6, to not only reach the internet, but let the internet reach you.

    Maybe in the future, we'll reach a point where it's common for households to have symmetrical bandwidth and host their own stuff from their home instead of having no option but to rely on VPS companies for that.

  • by DataWraith on 7/13/2019, 3:47 PM

    The obvious way to do it would be to forward a port in your router and then keep a dynamic DNS service (DuckDNS, for example) updated with your external IP address.

    As for networks, I personally use the Yggdrasil Network [1] to connect to my homeserver. Since it is a self-contained network, a blog hosted on there wouldn't be visible to the web, but it's very, very convenient for private access. It traverses NAT without any hassle once you connect to other peers.

    If you do connect to the network, you probably want to also set a whitelist of peers that are allowed to access your machine, otherwise it is open to the entire network.

    [1] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

  • by bradknowles on 7/14/2019, 6:38 AM

    Well, your ISP would be a third party, yes?

    I think it would be pretty hard to expose yourself to the internet without using your ISP, don’t you?

  • by BOOSTERHIDROGEN on 7/14/2019, 7:58 AM

    Have you consider wireguard ? Its fast and easy to setup with PI