You don’t need a static IP, you just have to keep track of what your current dynamic IP is.

You still need a public IP address. More and more often, IPv4 services are provided behind CGNAT, which won’t be able to work as you describe.

If you don’t have a public IPv4 for your LAN you can use IPv6. Or, you can reverse proxy your services through a gateway with a public IPv4.

I use a a reverse proxy (Pangolin) running on a VPS. A Newt tunnel connects my LAN to to Pangolin, exposing my local services via subdomains.

/edit; vpns are good and all, but they require you to setup software on the remote device to connect to it, and that typically routes most if not all your traffic back to the vpn server then out to the internet. That can create speed/bandwidth issues.

Tailscale, ZeroTier, and other similar services generally establish direct tunnels between devices, without a separate VPN server. They use a central service merely as a sort of common meeting point (STUN/TURN) for the devices to figure out how to establish direct tunnel(s).

What are you trying to accomplish with that?

I’ve got pangolin running on a VPS. It was dead simple.

Nothing to apologize for! I wish they wouldn’t be cagey about their actual offerings. I’d recommend them more if I didn’t gain anything from doing so.

Gotcha. I’m doing everything I can to avoid spamming, but that’s kinda hard to do when OP has specifically asked for a service provider…

I know this link will work: https://my.racknerd.com/aff.php?aff=17772&pid=953

That’s for the 2gb/2cpu service I use. From low-end to high-end, pids 952 ($21.99/yr), 953, 954, 955, and 956($119.99/yr) are currently available.

What software should I use to actually do the forwarding/proxying?

I highly recommend Pangolin. It does exactly what you’re looking for: Establishes a tunnel between your home server and the VPS, to proxy services on your home network through the VPS.

It also automatically sets up LetsEncrypt certs for your web services, and provides an optional security layer so only authenticated users can get through the proxy.

You can also do TCP and UDP port forwarding for non-web services.

What’s a good VPS provider for this?

I use Racknerd. You will need an affiliate link to get a good deal. I would not recommend the services they offer directly; the prices are considerably higher. Pangolin’s quick-start guide has affiliate links for three services; I use the 2gb option. They have other options, but we’ll have to move to DMs.

Let’s try this a different way…

How do you want to indicate something should be retained? What is the single, physical act you want to perform to tell the operating system “this thing needs to be captured”?

The screenshot folder itself is certainly not limited to just screenshots. Any file you can save can be kept in there. To my mind, the “entry point” is “saving a file to this particular folder”, regardless of the specific method used to do the saving. The screenshot is just an extremely convenient way to do that.

I just thought of a way to improve this technique with Tasker. Tasker can work with the clipboard, edit files, and take a screenshot. So, you could set up a gesture to trigger a task in Tasker. Tasker can then take the screenshot, dumping it into the folder. Tasker can then check the clipboard; if there is text in your clipboard, it can prepend it to a single “TODO.txt” in your screenshot folder.

Linux could be configured much the same way, using shutter and xclip to capture the screenshot and clipboard, respectively.

What always got me personally is exactly that — over time I’d end up with multiple “entry points” depending on context (screenshot, chat, browser, notes…).

So long as you’re manually processing everything, screenshots work for all of that. You can take a note in any text box anywhere, and screenshot it. Chat message? Screenshot. Browser? Screenshot. Notes? Screenshot. You can even take a photo and then screenshot it to capture it into your workflow.

I have Shutter (apt install shutter) on my desktop, and I’ve changed the Print Screen key to shortcut to “shutter -s”. This lets me capture an area of my screen with one button (and a mouse drag). Bam, more screenshot.

The downsides of screenshot are obvious, of course: Extracting the text from the screenshot is a bit of a pain in the ass. If you really want to keep the same entry point, though, you could setup a script to OCR newly captured screenshot/photos to extract the text. An OCR-friendly font might make that pretty reliable.

Now I want to improve my setup…

On my phone, my Screenshot folder is syncthing’d to my desktop, so most of the time, capturing something in the moment is as simple as dragging three fingers down my screen. My Camera and default Download folders are also syncthing’d, so just taking a picture or saving something from a browser has it captured across my devices.

I also use Tududi, which has Telegram integration, for the quick note. Taking the note is just a matter of sending a message in Telegram, which is available on all my devices. Signal’s “Note To Self” feature is also useful; I trust it more than Telegram for sensitive data. In Firefox on my desktop, I have “Automatic Tab Opener” (Browser extension) pulling up my Tududi inbox every hour, reminding me to actually deal with the notes I have previously taken.

Syncthing functions as a sort of decentralized Dropbox or Google drive, by keeping folder content synchronized across any number of devices. I haven’t tried the iOS clients, but android, Linux, and windows work great.

I would strongly suggest Pangolin for that use case. It combines a reverse proxy with a VPN tunnel between your local network and your VPS. You can host your services on your local machine, and serve them from the VPS. Pangolin also sets up your letsencrypt certs for https.

It also provides a security layer: if enabled for a site, you have to be logged in to Pangolin before Pangolin will proxy traffic to your site.

It depends on how you want to do it; how your reverse proxy server is setup. I use Pangolin running on a VPS as my proxy server. It uses a tunnel (“Newt”) between web servers running on my home network and the VPS, so I don’t need any open/forwarded ports on my home router.

I’ll need to know a little more about your setup. Sending DM…

An A record maps to an IP address. A CNAME record maps to another URL. Since you are trying to map to an IP address rather than a URL, you will want an A record.

If all of your sites will be served from the same proxy server at 204.230.30.104, you can create a single, wildcard A record for *.newexample.com. This will point every subdomain to your proxy’s IP address. You don’t need to create an A record for each subdomain.

If you are planning on serving some subdomains from 204.230.30.104 and other subdomains from another proxy at 69.4.20.187, you would need multiple A records for pointing the subdomains toward their respective proxies.

If you wanted to serve from proxy running on a dynamic IP address, and you’re using a DDNS provider to point newexample.ddns.net back to your current IP address, you could use a CNAME record to point newexample.com to newexample.ddns.net.

Government is also the entity that will be prosecuting/persecuting you when they don’t like what you have to say.

You can create a virtual machine, running within your debian install, to serve as your router. It actually works very well.

I used a headless Debian VM as a router with Shorewall to configure iptables. If I had to do it again, I probably would have used an opensense VM.

was just a standard residential setup,

The distinction is important because we are discussing IPv6. A “standard residential setup” with IPv6 would provide the user with an entire subnet rather than a single IP address. We still need a router to pass traffic from the ISP’s network to our own network, but we no longer need NAT.

It’ll take you public IP and translate those packets to use your internal one.

That is NAT, yes. But that is only one small function that a router can perform, and not all routers have NAT enabled. You only need NAT if your ISP only allows you to use a single IP address.

If your computer has an address that starts with 169, 168, or 10 there is a NAT somewhere in your network.

That’s not actually true. I can create such a network without connecting it to the internet, no NAT. I can create a second network, again, no NAT. I can then use a gateway router that allows any node on the first network to reach any node on the second. That router is still not doing any NAT. It’s just passing traffic between two networks.

Every single one of those temporary IP addresses has the same prefix, which traces back to you.

Its about as anonymous as adding an apartment number to your own street address.