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 could 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 becoming 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. Luckily, 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 should have a Pi Hole on your network, but it's not mandatory.
• 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

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).

Remote accessing your home network can be an hassle. Let's see the most common options:

• Public IP address. Easiest: go get a DynDNS account of any kind and set it up in your ISP router, enable port-forwarding for your server or DMZ it, and you are all set. There are plenty of guides for this case, i will not get into more details.
• Private IP address, but with port-forwarding supported by your ISP: still easy, enable the relevant settings in your ISP router and go to a website like this one and find out your IP address. It might change over time, but you can still use the DynDNS trick by installing the DynDNS client on your server. Again, i will not get into more details for this option.
• Private IP address and no port-forwarding. Please note that your ISP router will still have port-forwarding options, but they will be totally useless as they will only forward your ports to your ISP private network, and NOT the real internet. A clear example of this is when your supposedly external ip (you can usually see this in your ISP router page) is in fact on a private subnet (ex: 10.x.y.z). I will cover this case. Well, you are in the worst possible condition and, let's be honest, there is NO way out unless you go down two different paths: * Buy a VPN that provides port-forwarding. Avoid any VPN without port-forwarding. This is, again, easy but it's pricey and doesn't really gives you any more advantages, so this is not my preferred solution and i will let you explore this one yourself. * Rent (or access somehow) a server on the internet with a public static IP address. This is the best solution in my view (albeit probably more expensive than a VPN) because it opens a world of opportunities for you. —- Next to: The *Arr's setup Prev to: Storage Setup