My Home Lab Adventure So Far... Now im stuck :(

[Teeson]

Good Day!

 

A couple week ago I decided to bring life into one of my old systems. My goal with the server is to host a back-up NAS for our phones and other devices, host game server for my friends(at most 10 players on a server) and to learn how to use services like PFSense, PIHole, and many more I haven't even found yet. Started in researching what hypervisor to use, UNRAID or Proxmox was the final 2 I was researching. I decided to use Promox after the many hours of watching videos. 

 

Server Specs:

• AMD Ryzen 5 1400
• 32GB of Ram
• Nvidia GTX 1080 (Ready to install when I want to learn video encoding or passthrough to VM)
• 240GB SSD Boot Drive
• 3 Random HDD's (Wanted to learn systems before spending big money on redundancy) 
  • 2X 1 TB
  • 1X 2 TB
• Starlink internet
• Router Asus RT-AX86S

For what hardware I had laying around I figured that was pretty good for first home server. After I got it all together I installed Promox. In the adventure of installing Promox I learn about creating a Ventoy boot drive. That thing is awesome! I was sure tired of all the USB stick I've wasted making windows and Linux boot drives trying things out in the past. Next mission was to install True NAS Scale. It went pretty smooth I would say. I have a SMB share that my window machines can see and our phones auto backing up with a app called AutoSync. It is setup whenever our phones connect to home Wi-Fi it will check and backup once a day.  

 

The next day was started with making a Debian VM. The install went relatively uneventful. Now I wanted to learn about Dockers, dockers sound good? I think. I installed docker with Portainer and... Now the confusion and issues have started. I wanted to put a docker for game server hosting. I looked into Pterodactyl, It looked like what I exactly needed. Well I could make it work, couldn't use web UI or anything after I installed it(I think properly). Since it wasnt working for me I looked into alternatives.

After many hours of searching and video watching I came across CubeCoders AMP one time payment of $10 for the software well I bought it. First I tried to install in docker, no luck. Since that didn't work it was install right on a the Debian OS. Install went good, can access web UI.

 

Gamer server hosting time! Yay! Tired of paying Nitrado money. First game server to setup is 7 Days to Die, server files and install goes good. Can connect on local network, runs good. Now my issues start, port forwarding... I login into router, enable port forwarding and add all the ports I need. Launch 7 Days to Die I see the server in the list... I cant connect... check port forwarding and router settings many times... looks like it is all correct. Tried to connect again, can see on server list and can't connect. So time for research for many many hours. 

After many hours of research I came up with many possible solutions. Things I found were proxy, reverse proxy, own a domain name, Starlink sucks, something else is block ports(don't even know what), enabling DMZ and VPN. With being all confused where to start I tried many things. Started with trying to install NGINX Proxy Manager on Portainer. So I pulled up a video tutorial, said I need a domain to use since I don't have a static IP. I went looking for domain names to buy, went to google domains. I learnt that Square Space now handles the domains, bought my domain for the year(actually pretty cheap). Okay sweet I have a domain now lets install NGINX, following video tutorial. I got to the point of ran install and it said it was running. Okay sweet, time to connect to Web UI and make my account to set up everything and... couldn't connect to the web UI. Well time to troubleshoot, tried reinstalling the container a couple times, install another different docker to see if I could connect to that Web UI.. NOPE! Well for some reason I cant connect to my containers in docker. Well maybe that was my issue when I was trying out Pterodactyl. 

 

Now I am just lost on what to do. I went a started to poke around my router settings again. I tried enabling DMZ for the Debian VM(Maybe I have to enable for Hypervisor), still wasn't able to connect. Looked around router again then I found DDNS on the router. Since I didn't know how to use the paid domain on my router, I used a no-ip domain since it was easy supposed on there. Okay sweet did that fix my issue? NOPE! Tried to connect to game server again, same story it was on server list but cant connect.

 

Sooo In the end I came here to make this post in hopes of someone might be able to point me in the right direction!

 

Thanks for reading long post. Will update when/if I get things working.

[Marvin_The_Robot]

I've had similar issues trying to do my Homelab stuff.
My issues ended up being the ISP having a CG-NAT and/or blocking the ports 80,443.
Contacted my Broadband provider and asked to have a static IP (cost extra) and unblock the ports I needed.
There may be a reverse-proxy tunneling option that could bypass the CG-NAT issue, but I just went the easy route first.

There may be a few online articles about bypassing the CG-NAT for Starlink that may help.

 

Good luck!