I am on Dragonfish 24.04. I tried Nginx by adding a host forwarding http://plex.truenas.local to http://192.168.5.121:32400, but it does nothing. When my family visit “plex.truenas.local” the page does not exist.
I just want this mapping within my LAN, not exposed on the internet.
What’s the best way to do this? Thanks for the help.
A reverse proxy, most likely Nginx Proxy Manager (though other options include Traefik and Caddy). This write-up is for EE:
This topic has some further information:
@dan, thanks so much.
From your wiki, looks like I need to own the actual domain name for this to work? Thanks again.
To follow my guide as written, yes. My guide has you getting a publicly-trusted TLS cert, and in order to do that, you must own or control a real domain (which could be a DDNS domain). NPM doesn’t have to be used that way, though; you could instead create a self-signed cert for something like *.player.lan, and set up your individual services as, e.g., plex.player.lan.
NPM doesn’t have to be used that way, though; you could instead create a self-signed cert for something like
*.player.lan, and set up your individual services as, e.g.,plex.player.lan.
Is the above done by managing things on my router? Or is it something I perform on TrueNas scale? I do own public domain names but they are not relevant to my home NAS. So if I ask my family to type in “plex.bestpromoitems.com” they would be confused.
So I think ideally if I can make up some domain names that makes sense, such as “plex.myhome.com” etc. that would be ideal.
Likely so. More precisely, it would need to be managed with whatever manages DNS for whoever you want to be able to access this stuff.
So, if (as is usually the case) your router serves DNS to your LAN, and everyone you want to access this stuff is on your LAN, then your router is where you’d set it up. If instead you use something like Pi-Hole or AdGuard Pro for local DNS, you’d set it up there. In these cases, you can freely make up domain names, but do not put them in existing top-level domains (so you could, e.g., use myhome.lan, but not myhome.com). You can do HTTPS in these cases, but only with a self-signed certificate, so you will get certificate errors (though you can bypass them).
If you want remote users to be able to access your stuff by way of a domain name, though, you have a bit of a problem. In that case, you’ll need a public domain name so that you can update public DNS records, so that your remote users will be able to resolve those names.
Consider that domain names are cheap, starting around US$10-15 per year (and in some cases even less, though those cases usually have strings attached). If you want it to have some connection to your name or purpose, it may take some searching to find a suitable one available, but if you just want something short, you can search for it here:
The last domain I ordered, I didn’t really care what it was, I just wanted something short. 2v6.in was available, so I picked it up and went with it. It’s six meaningless characters as far as I’m concerned, but if ever I share it with someone, it’s going to be in writing anyway, so it doesn’t much matter to me that it be meaningful. You can, of course, search there, maybe finding something incorporating your name or initials so as to be somewhat meaningful. Or if you don’t care that the domain name be short, that isn’t so much of an issue anyway.
Another option would be to use Tailscale with its Magic DNS feature, which gives you your own private subdomain. Some relevant information on that option:
Great info!
I did try tailscale but the installation on 24.04 did not work. It has some permission issue but the apps default image for tailscale in 24.04 has no config options on the install page unlike most other apps. I am relatively new to the Linux world and have no clue how to fix it.
I will look at my router Asus RT88 see if I can make it work.
