The network configuration is divided into two different parts: the home network and the remote access. The most complex part is being capable to remotely login to your home network because that requires the capability to actually reach your home network from outside some how. Back in the good days when you connected to the internet you where granted a public IP address that you caould use to access your home network from outside. After some time, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) started giving you, more and more frequently, only a private ip address due to the well known scarcity of IPv4 address pool. This is much more common outside the U.S.A. and mostly common outside the western world. With mobile connections nowadays quite common for the home connections (it's much cheaper to place a few 5G towers than to cable fiber everywhere) things are even worse than than. Luckly, at the same time, renting a VPS or a dedicated server with a public IP address is getting cheaper and easier. So there are always hopes for you.

Home networks are usually flat. This means you have no VLANs or managed Layer3 switches at home. You might have a guest network in addition to your main network (for the more advanced or privacy concerned of you) but that doesn't change the gist of it. Your server will be sitting connected to your home network and it will be reachable by all your devices (smart TVs, phones, tablets and PCs).

I will assume your home network is on 192.168.0.0/255, and i will make the follow assumptions:

• You are connected to the internet using a router provided by your ISP at 192.168.0.254
• Your server will have a static IP address set up as 192.168.0.1
• The rest of your devices are on DHCP
• You should have a Pi Hole on your network, but it's not mandatory.

Why static IP for your server? So that you can always reach it and you can easily set it's address to your devices without resorting to weird DNS setups or modifying your ISP (or Pi Hole) provided DHCP settings.

You should have already configured your network during the Gentoo installation, but in case you didn't, you should do it now. There are many ways to do so with Gentoo: you can go fully manual or use NetworkManager, for example. Please refer to the great Gentoo Full Networking Handbook page for more details.

I strongly suggest you use some better DNS settings than your own provider, since in many countries torrent sites and such might be filtered by laws. Edit your /etc/resolv.conf:

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.8.4

(Note: be aware that if you use NetworkManager you need to set DNS within it's interface. The resolv.conf file will be overwritten)

to use Google's own DNS. No i don't like Google in particular, but their DNS servers works just fine and don't censor any interesting site (so far).

DNS

So i have a flat home-network (1 subnet) with one upstream connection (ISP provider) that offers a private IP address and zero port-forwarding capabilties at all. I will get a bit more in details:

  Flat home network: subnet 192.168.0.0/24, media server is on 192.168.0.1, ISP gateway is on 192.168.0.254. All home devices are within this range.
  ISP provider with private IP (like over 4G or 5G, or some fiber ISPs too) that prevent you from using any DynDNS services
  No port forwarding at all, even if the ISP router do provide a "port forward" section, it does not work due to the private IP.

If you are, like me, in this situation you really don't have much choice. You can still obtain remote access if you have access to some kind of public IP like a VPS or if you can lease/access a server with a public/static address… Otherwise, there might be other solutions (like Plex) which i will not get into details here.

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