Port forwarding
Introduction
Port Forwarding is one of the main things you’ll be doing with your home server. Be careful, as you want to minmize the attack surface of your home server by exposing/forwarding as little ports as possible. As you may know, your personal computer is sitting behind what is known as a NAT, which is run by your router. Your ISP assigns you one IP address, and NAT shares this address with all the devices in your network. This is great for outbound connections, but what if you want to connect to a specific device in your network? This is what port forwarding is for. Your router can be set up to route all traffic from a specific port to a set device on your network. For example, I forward ports 80 (http), and 443 (https) to 192.168.1.183 on my home network. Then, someone tries to connect to my public IP address (e.g. 123.456.789.012), my router will forward all traffic from those two ports to 192.168.1.183.
Tutorial (sort of)
Now you know what port forwarding is, you need to know how to set it up. On my linksys home router, it’s in security –> apps and gaming –> port range forwarding. Every router is different. Then you add a new port range forwarding, and specify device IP (it’s recommended to reserve the IP address so it doesn’t change), port you want to forward, and enter in the application name (not required).