I recently found out that you can get up to 3 free .eu.cc domain from GNAME, which also claims that you can renew for free when its within 90 days of expiring. So I got one to check it out.
Obviously, the next step is making one of my local machines act as the target destination for any queries to the address, so it becomes accessible for the wider web. I’m not entirely sure, however, what to configure on GNAME (there’s the option to setup A and AAAA records, which I suppose I should just point to my IP, but there’s also CNAME, TXT, NS, SRV and what configurations/programs my local server (rPi 3) needs to have running besides a webserver (Apache2 or Nginx)
My intent is to have it run a single-user fediverse server, possibly friendica, as it seems to have the best support for seeing all sorts of APub posts. If that proves too heavy for my old pi, I’ll try one of the lightweight APub alternatives
I know I’ll also need to do some configurations on my router, so I’d appreciate help on this, too.
A records return the numerical address of a name.
CNAME returns a different name for a name. Basically ‘synonym’ so the maintainer only has to change the one master, A record when the IP address changes. Convenient to use CNAME to point www.example.com to example.com, but you can use it just as well to point example.com at my.private.host.xyz You can even chain multiple CNAMEs to make it easier to manage a complex backend structure while presenting a simple address to users.