Self hosting my own webspace

Introduction

With the increasingly popular single board computers, anybody can have a low powered Linux server at home. The most popular of single board computers are Raspberry Pi, which is now at version 5 of the board.

Well, since the Raspberry Pi is rather expensive for me, I opt to use a repurposed Set Top Box board with Armbian powering the board in place of Android TV. My experience has been great so far.

The specification

My set top box is branded as MXQ-4K pro. The box boots out of the box with Android 7 TV OS. Now, it’s booting Armbian.

Here is the system specification of the box.

mydeardiary@rk322x-box
---------------
OS: Armbian (24.2.0-trunk.535) armv7l
Host: Generic RK322x Tv Box board
Kernel: 6.6.16-current-rockchip
Uptime: 9 hours, 40 mins
Packages: 810 (dpkg)
Shell: bash 5.2.15
Terminal: /dev/pts/0
CPU: Generic DT based system (4) @ 1.008GHz
Memory: 244MiB / 978MiB

Well, when running the Android TV OS, the memory reported by the Android UI is almost 2G. I have not looked at /proc/meminfo when android is running so I have no idea if the claimed 2G memory is real or just an upped number of the actual 1G memory shown here.

The challenge

Since the set top box is using standard fiber over wi-fi link, the egress is not so great, so I don’t serve large files or bandwidth hogger files via my set top box.

Also the access to ipv4 is another challenge, so I ended up using both Tailscale funnel service and ngrok to serve the webpage to ipv4 only internet users.

Fortunately, the internet connection has a working global ipv6 address so I can serve contents on the set top box directly without relying on hacky port forwarding.

For the domain, I signed up for free dynamic dns service from Dynu with a systemd-timer runs every 10 minutes to update ipv6 endpoint to Dynu. I’ve set up the TTL of my dynamic dns to 600 seconds.

For those who has the curiosity

Well, the self hosted webspace is available and has AAAA dns records. For those who doesn’t have access to ipv6, the self hosted webspace can be accessed via ipv4 thanks to netiter for providing free ipv4 frontend (reverse proxy) for ipv6 only website.

Thanks for your curiosity of my self hosted webspace.

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