Table of Contents

Networking and DNS

Your services need to be reachable by name. This page explains how to set up DNS and decide which ports to expose.

What this page covers

  • Understanding your public IP: static vs. dynamic (DDNS)
  • DNS setup: A records, wildcard subdomains
  • Port planning: which ports to open (80, 443, and optionally 22)
  • Firewall rules with ufw

DNS setup

For each service you plan to expose (e.g., gitea.example.com, youtrack.example.com), create an A record pointing to your server's public IP. A wildcard record (*.example.com) simplifies this by routing all subdomains to a single IP, letting your reverse proxy handle routing by hostname.

Port planning

Port Purpose
22 SSH (restrict to your IP if possible)
80 HTTP (redirect to HTTPS)
443 HTTPS (all services via reverse proxy)

Avoid exposing individual service ports directly. Route everything through the reverse proxy on 443.

Firewall with ufw

sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw enable