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from the questions,-questions,-questions dept.
I'm putting this under security because i'd like to keep this a private server for family:
that said, I'm wondering if you fine people can help me with the best way to set up a web server in my house to host the files on my external hard drives for family members in other cities/countries while, again, keeping it private and secure over the internet.
I'm looking into ngrok for url handling, but am not sure exactly if this is the best way to go.
Can anyone save me time and possible heartache and failure and provide me (and possibly others) with a walk-through of which software to use. Would love to do something like free, but may have to get a paid unique domain from, say, ngrok, to make it easier for family members to connect up.
Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi... you're my only hope!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @10:04PM
Running a web server is not a click-through install process, and keeping it secure is even more difficult. You can have your own domain and map it to your IP, but if you have a dynamic IP then that will be a problem over time. If you want to run the server from home then you really need to isolate that machine as much as possible. I'm not sure how easily you can quarantine a machine with consumer routers.
Exposing an external hard drive to the web easily will make it more difficult to secure, and you will want SSL encryption at the minimum. A paid subscription to Dropbox or some other entity is probably a better option if you don't know enough to do this project yourself.
That said, the easiest way I can think of is to simply have apache or nginx hosting the external hard drives with http auth enabled, then just hand out the address and user/pass.