As the OP states you can get a registrar to host a domain for you and then you create a subdomain anywhere you fancy and that includes at home. Do get the glue records right and do use dig to work out what is happening.
Now with a domain under your own control, you can use CNAME records in other zones to point at your zones and if you have dynamic DNS support on your zones (RFC 2136) then you can now support ACME ie Lets Encrypt and Zerossl and co.
Sadly certbot doesn't do (or it didn't) CNAME redirects for ACME. However, acme.sh and simple-acme do and both are absolutely rock solid. Both of those projects are used by a lot of people and well trod.
acme.sh is ideal for unix gear and if you follow this blokes method of installation: https://pieterbakker.com/acme-sh-installation-guide-2025/ usefully centralised.
simple-acme is for Windows. It has loads of add on scripts to deal with scenarios. Those scripts seem to be deprecated but work rather well. Quite a lot of magic here that an old school Linux sysadmin is glad of.
PowerDNS auth server supports dynamic DNS and you can filter access by IP and TSIG-KEY, per zone and/or globally.
Join the dots.
[EDIT: Speling, conjunction switch]
This sounds like you are complaining about Ubuntu, not the software you wish to install in Ubuntu.
https://github.com/ndilieto/uacme
Tiny, simple, reliable. What more can you ask?
acme.sh was too garish for my liking, even as a guy that likes his fair share of shell scripts. And obviously certbot is a non-starter because of snap.
The new setup is using uAcme and nsupdate to do DNS-01 challenges. No more fiddling with any issues in the web server config for a particular virtual host, like some errant rewrite rule that prevents access to .well-known/.
This makes me so happy. Acme and certbot trying to do this is annoying, Caddy trying to get certs by default is annoying. I ended up on a mix of dehydrated and Apache mod_md but I think I like the look of uACME because dehydrated just feels clunky
Without CNAME redirect I wouldn't be able to automatically renew wildcard ssl for client domains with dns that has no API. Even if they do have an API, doing it this way stops me from needing to deal with two different APIs
Are you certain? Not at a real machine at the moment so hard for me to dig into the details but CNAMEing the challenge response to another domain is absolutely supported via DNS-01 [0] and certbot is Let's Encrypt's recommended ACME client: [1]
Since Let’s Encrypt follows the DNS standards when
looking up TXT records for DNS-01 validation, you can
use CNAME records or NS records to delegate answering
the challenge to other DNS zones. This can be used to
delegate the _acme-challenge subdomain to a validation
specific server or zone.
The issue you may have run into is that CNAME records are NOT allowed at the zone apex, for RFC 1033 states:
The CNAME record is used for nicknames. [...] There must not be any other
RRs associated with a nickname of the same class.
P.S. doing literally fucking anything on mobile is like pulling teeth encased in concrete. Since this is how the vast majority of the world interfaces with computing I am totally unsurprised that people are claiming 10x speedups with LLMs.
That is to say, if you misconfigure it, or try to turn it off, you will have an invalid domain until the TTL runs out, and it's really just not worth the headache unless you have a real use case.
Did DNSSEC for company website, worked with zero maintenance for several years. On a cloud-provided DNS. Would want the same on self-hosted DNS too.
Yes, but with nowadays https/tls usage it's almost irrelevant for normal websites.
If bad actors can create valid tls certs they can solve the dnssec problem.
[0]: https://www.knot-dns.cz/docs/3.5/singlehtml/index.html#autom...
And when using such turn-key DNSSEC support, I think there's very little risk to enabling it. While other commenters pointing out its marginal utility are correct, turn-key DNSSEC support that Just Works™ de-risks it enough for me that the relatively marginal utility just isn't a concern.
Plus, once you've got DNSSEC enabled, you can at the very least start to enjoy stuff like SSHFP records. DANE may not have any real-world traction, but who knows what the future may bring.
For me, that means doing routing, DNS, VPN, and associated stuff with one box running OpenWRT. It works. It's ridiculously stable. And rather than having a number of things that could break the network when they die, I only have 1 thing that can do so.
That box currently happens to be a Raspberry Pi 4 that uses VLANs as Ethernet port expanders, but it is also stable AF with a [shock! horror!] USB NIC. I picked that direction years ago mostly because I have a strong affinity towards avoiding critical moving parts (like cooling fans) in infrastructure.
But those details don't matter. Any single box running OpenWRT, OPNsense, pfSense, Debian, FreeBSD, or whatever, can behave more-or-less similarly.
[1]: Yeah, so about that. If the real-world MTBF for a system that relies upon 1 box is 10 years, then the MTBF for a system relying on 2 boxes to both keep working is only 5 years. Less is more.
All I can think of is that it adds obscurity, in that it makes the address of the Minecraft server more difficult to discover or guess (and thus keeps everything a bit more private/griefing-resistant while still letting kids play the game together).
And AXFR zone transfers are one way that DNS addresses leak. (AXFR is a feature, not a bug.)
As a potential solution:
You can set up DNS that resolves the magic hardcoded Minecraft server name (whatever that is) to the address of your choosing, and that has AXFR disabled. In this way, nobody will be able to discover the game server's address unless they ask that particular DNS server for the address of that particular name.
It's not airtight (obscurity never is), but it's probably fine. It increases the size of the haystack.
(Or... Lacking VPN, you can whitelist only the networks that the kids use to play from. But in my experience with whitelisting, the juice isn't worth the squeeze in a world of uncontrollably-dynamic IP addresses. All someone wants to do is play the game/access the server/whatever Right Now, but the WAN address has changed so that doesn't work until they get someone's attention and wait for them to make time to update the whitelist. By the time this happens, Right Now is in the past. Whitelisting generally seems antithetical towards getting things done in a casual fashion.)
So we're hosting our own minecraft server and a suitable connector for cross-play - and it's easy to join on tablets, computers and so on because there's a button that allows you to enter an address. But on the switch, Microsoft in its wisdom decided that there'd be no "join random server" button. But there are some official realm servers, and they just happen to host a lobby and the client understands some interface commands sent by the server (1). Some folks in the community devised a great hack - you just host a lobby yourself that presents a list of servers of your choice. But to do that, you need to bend the DNS entries of a few select hostnames that host the "official" lobbies so that they now point to your lobby. Which means you need to run a resolver that is capable of resolving all hostnames, because you need to set it in the switchs networking settings as the primary DNS server.
Now, there are people that run resolvers in the community and that might be one option, but I'm honestly a bit picky about who gets to see what hostnames my kids switch wants to resolve.
Whitelisting networks is impossible - it's residential internet.
The reason I'd be interested in running this behind a VPN is that I don't want to run an open resolver and become part of an amplification attack. (And sadly, the Switch 1 does not have a sufficiently modern DNS stack so that I can just enable DNS cookies and be done with it. The Switch 2 supports it).
Sorry if this sounds complicated. It's just hacks on hacks on hacks. But it works.
(1) judging from the looks and feel, this is actually implemented as a minecraft game interface and the client just treats that as a game server. It even reports the number of players hanging out in the lobby.
You could also add whitelisting on your dns server to known IPs, or at least ranges to limit exposure, add rate limiting / detection of patterns you wouldn’t exhibit etc.
You could rotate your dns endpoint address every x minutes on some known algorithm implemented client and server side.
But in the end it’s mostly security through obscurity, unless you go via your own tailnet or similar
Last few days I've been migrating everything to luadns format, stored in github and then I have github actions triggering a script to convert it to octodns and apply it.
I could have just used either, but I like the luadns format but didn't want to be stuck using them as a provider
Better yet, set up ssh to the proxmox server and ask claude code to set it up for you, works like a charm! claude can call ssh and dig and verify that your dns chains work, it can test your firewall and ports (basically running pen tests against yourself..), it can sort out almost any issue (I had intel wifi card and had firmware locks on broadcasting in 5GHZ spectrum in AP Mode - mediatek doesn't - claude helped try to override firmware in kernel but intel firmware won't budge). It can setup automatic nightly updates that are safe, it can help you setup recovery/backup plans (which runs before updates), it can automate certain proxmox tasks (periodic snapshotting of vm's) and best of all, it can document the entire infrastructure comprehensively each time I make changes to it.
1. Run OpenWRT
2. Use it for the DNS of one's own choosingUnless of course you will invest 5-6 figures worth of US dollars worth of equipment, which by then you can look back and ask yourself, was I better off with Google Cloud DNS, AWS Route 53 and the likes.
The main thing I can think of is DNS amplification attacks, but that's more your DNS server being used as part of a DDoS attack rather than being targeted for one. Also (afaik) resolvers are more common targets for DNS amplification than authoritative.