Guide

What is it

LnkStart is two pieces: a server that you install on your VPS and an agent that runs on each machine you want to publish (your home, your office, a laptop, a NAS). The agent opens a connection to the server, so the home machine does not need a public IP, does not need to open ports on the router, and the ISP does not need to cooperate.

Traffic flows between your visitors, your server, and your machines. It does not go through our network: the server is yours and the code running it is on your VPS.

• Visitor → your server (the domain is yours, HTTPS too).
• Your server → the connection that the agent already has open.
• Agent → your app, at 127.0.0.1 or another machine on your local network.

What you need

• A VPS with a public IP (a small one is enough: it only forwards traffic).
• A domain, with two DNS records: tunnels.midominio.com and *.tunnels.midominio.com pointing to the VPS IP.
• On the machines you publish: internet connectivity. Nothing else.

The wildcard record (*) is what lets each service have its own address: app.tunnels.midominio.com, nas.tunnels.midominio.com, whatever you publish. Your bare domain, tunnels.midominio.com, is free to publish your own website: the server identifies itself separately, at lnk.tunnels.midominio.com, and that name is reserved.

Limits

• Server on Linux; agent on Linux (Raspberry Pi and Docker too) and macOS.
• It is not a full private network: it gives access to specific services, not to the whole machine.