Hello
I want to set up a home server. I live in China. I am sure if dynamic DNS will work? Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with this? Would it work with a VPN?
If dynamic DNS won’t work. what about services such as Pagekite? I tried Pagekite with NextCloud and it works, but it is slow. Would Pagekite or a similar service work with Seafile?
Dustin
Why shouldn’t it? Its independent of Seafile. Easiest would be to setup dyndns in your router and setup Seafile using the domain. Using letsencrypt you could also encrypt your traffic.
VPN will also work.
The reason I asked is because China has the Great China Firewall and other restrictions on internet freedom. I don’t know if that would prevent the dynamic DNS from working. I have a good VPN provider so I assume if I use the VPN it should work, but I really don’t understand how Dynamic DNS works.
Dustin
Dynamic DNS solves exactly one common issue: Many internet service providers do not give you a fixed IP address but change your address every night. Dynamic DNS just updates your DNS entries whenever your IP address changes and allows you to access your “home” using a domain name (e.g. home.example.com).
In contrast servers on the internet usually have a fixed IP address and one just sets a DNS entry once and it stays valid (because the IP address doesn’t change).
Regarding the restrictions in China I cannot help you.
What I don’t understand is how the VPN interacts with Dynamic DNS. For example, does the dynamic DNS service use the IP address generated by the VPN, or do they need me to provide the IP address provided by the ISP?
How do I know my IP address issued by the ISP? I am using 2 wifi routers. The first wifi router is connected to the second router. When I search on Google for 'what is my ip" I can get the IP for my computer (or is this the IP of the wifi router?) Would this be the IP a dynamic DNS service needs to know?
If DNS and VPN are no Option for you, you can think about writing a simple dynamic IP distributor. (I’ll call this DID)
A DID can easily realised by a small bashscript running on you seafile server which does the following:
You can then use the new IP address in your client/browser.
If I could not I could nit use DNS this would be my approach. Innfact changeing IP address all my clients everyday would be annoing, but several provirers change the IP address not that often.
If DID is an option for you and you need help in writing such a script feel free to ask me about it. 
Not sure if ZeroTier will work on China with their restrictions, but imo it’s the best free and open source P2P VPN (more like SDN) I’ve tried so far. Traffic between your devices is encrypted and authenticated, so you can comfortably use their relays to get started. A disadvantage would be that only the devices on your virtual network will be able to access the server, an upside to that is that your server won’t be exposed to the internet.
https://www.zerotier.com/
fakuivan
Thanks for the info for Zero Tier. I don’t really understand what it is. Is this like Syncthing? Do I need a public URL for my server for this to work? My problem is I can’t get a public URL. I don’t need others to connect to my network. I am just going to use this for personal and family.
Dustin
zt creates a virtual LAN to which you can add devices to, it then takes care of communicating those devices using the internet or the physical LAN if they reside under the same one. This guy does a decent job of explaining how it works https://youtu.be/Bl_Vau8wtgc . You can always read the manual too.
Don’ t have much knowledge about this but china have serious censorship laws and don’t know what VPN are you using