Little late to be writing about it, but I finally got a loadbalancer set up so I can open various self-hosted to the internet to be accessible from outside my home network. It’s on port 433, and has a sterner.digital SSL certificate. This means that I can finally host multiple websites without having to remember the port number – instead I can go to https://status.sterner.digital/status or https://cloud.sterner.digital/login to reach various pages that I host. No need for a secondary external IP address.
Example: I host a status page, and a cloud hosting service. One is internally on port 3001, the other is on port 8880. So, rather than going to https://status.sterner.digital:3001/status I just punch in https://status.sterner.digital/status. This also makes it easier to lock down various ports in my firewall. No need to open port 3001 or 8880 – everything runs through port 433 for a secure connection.
While KEMP advertises LoadMaster as a loadbalancer, it’s basically just a reverse proxy. Not a whole lot of load balancing for my use case. It’s a bit of a pain to understand how to set it up, but it’s super easy once you’ve set up your SSL cert. The benefit of KEMP’s product is that it’s free for pretty much all home-use that you could imagine.
I ended up running LoadMaster on Hyper-V on Windows Server 2019 (Brand new server, but more on that later). I’m used to having VMs crash every now and again, so I’m pretty surprised that it hasn’t crashed yet.. At all.. 44 days of uptime without a problem.
There’s still a lot to learn. One thing I’m still trying to figure out is whether or not it can support multiple domains, rather than just subdomains. I’d love to move all of the various Sitekick pages and their subdomains to port 433 and enable real SSL, rather than Cloudflare’s flexible SSL, but that’s a problem for another day.
For now, I’m just glad that it all works, my sites are available when I’m not at home, and all around I’m just happy to say that I have a working loadbalancer in my homelab.
