A grand project – Streaming and Video Hosting – Part 2 – Design, Planning, and Notes

Rough network diagram, showing a private network on the left of the router, and a DMZ network on the right, showing a separation of traffic between the two and sharing the Internet connection.

Having decided on a goal, it’s now time to rough out the approach. Basically, what do I need to do to make this happen?

  1. Decide on regular DNS or Dynamic DNS to provide an external DNS hostname so other peers can find my instance.
    1. regular DNS
      1. Domain: perivid.xyz
        1. Registered, registrar chosen, domain chosen.
        2. DNS A record pointed at my external WAN address (that rarely changes)
    2. Keep an eye on my external address for any changes (there are utilities you can use to watch the external address and notify you when it changes – also my external IP address has only changed once in 3 years, so I’m not super concerned)
  2. Configure router/firewall to activate separate network on second LAN port, and configure firewall.
    1. Activated separate network with entirely different subnet (diagram does not reflect reality, only allegory)
    2. Added firewall rule to drop all packets from DMZ on LAN2 to LAN1
  3. Acquire hardware:
    1. New, bigger, microSD card for Raspberry PI (256 GB).
    2. External USB SSD drive (1 TB, USB-C with USB-A adapter)
    3. Managed Ubiquiti 5 port switch for the small DMZ network
    4. All awaiting delivery
  4. (These steps per YouTube video on how to set up PeerTube on a Raspberry PI 4)
    Install Raspbian LITE on 256 GB microSD card

    1. This is done via a utility that runs on a host computer, usually.
  5. Attach external drive to Raspberry PI and partition it, and verify it works as a filesystem.
  6. Install Dependencies for PeerTube
    1. By this point, the Raspberry PI is either connected to the DMZ with another computer using ssh connected to it, or I may run it within the LAN itself – it probably doesn’t really matter too much security-wise, though it would probably be prudent to plug it into the switch that connects to LAN 2 as soon as convenient, just in case.
  7. Install PeerTube
  8. Configure PeerTube
  9. Test PeerTube
  10. Troubleshooting
  11. Set up port forwarding rules on router to forward traffic to the Raspberry PI instance of PeerTube
  12. Troubleshooting
  13. Move forward with creating user account and configuring both the Instance and my user account Channel, playlists,, etc.
  14. Figure out how to federate instance with other instances.

Done!

I’ll update this outline as more steps becoming apparent via the how-to and related videos.

This post is number 2 in a series. As it progresses, I’ll update the table of contents below so you can find other parts.

  1. Part 1
  2. Part 2 (this one)
  3. Part 3