tldr: I’d like to set up a reverse proxy with a domain and an SSL cert so my partner and I can access a few selfhosted services on the internet but I’m not sure what the best/safest way to do it is. Asking my partner to use tailsclae or wireguard is asking too much unfortunately. I was curious to know what you all recommend.

I have some services running on my LAN that I currently access via tailscale. Some of these services would see some benefit from being accessible on the internet (ex. Immich sharing via a link, switching over from Plex to Jellyfin without requiring my family to learn how to use a VPN, homeassistant voice stuff, etc.) but I’m kind of unsure what the best approach is. Hosting services on the internet has risk and I’d like to reduce that risk as much as possible.

  1. I know a reverse proxy would be beneficial here so I can put all the services on one box and access them via subdomains but where should I host that proxy? On my LAN using a dynamic DNS service? In the cloud? If in the cloud, should I avoid a plan where you share cpu resources with other users and get a dedicated box?

  2. Should I purchase a memorable domain or a domain with a random string of characters so no one could reasonably guess it? Does it matter?

  3. What’s the best way to geo-restrict access? Fail2ban? Realistically, the only people that I might give access to live within a couple hundred miles of me.

  4. Any other tips or info you care to share would be greatly appreciated.

  5. Feel free to talk me out of it as well.

  • Asparagus0098@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    I use traefik with a wildcard domain pointing to a Tailscale IP for services I don’t want to be public. For the services I want to be publicly available I use cloudflare tunnels.

  • powermaker450@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    if you know/use docker, the solution that has been the most straightforward for me is SWAG. the setup process is fairly easy when combined with registering your domain with Porkbun, as they allow free API access needed for obtaining top-level (example.com) as well as wildcard (*.example.com) SSL certificates.

    along with that, exposing a new service is fairly easy with the plethora of already included nginx configs for services like Nextcloud, Syncthing, etc.

  • towerful@programming.devEnglish
    6·
    6 days ago

    For point number 2, security through obscurity is not security.
    Besides, all issued certificates are logged publicly. You can search them here https://crt.sh/

    Nginx Proxy Manager is easy to set up and will do LE acme certs, has a nice GUI to manage it.

    If it’s just access to your stuff for people you trust, use tailscale or wireguard (or some other VPN of your choice) instead of opening ports to the wild internet.
    Much less risk

  • rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    5·
    6 days ago

    Why is it too much asking your partner to use wireguard? I installed wireguard for my wife on her iPhone, she can access everything in our home network like she was at home, and she doesn’t even know that she is using VPN.

    • a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      31·
      6 days ago

      A few reasons

      1. My partner has plenty of hobbies but sys-admin isn’t one of them. I know I’ll show them how to turn off wireguard to troubleshoot why “the internet isn’t working” but eventually they would forget. Shit happens, sometimes servers go down and sometimes turning off wireguard would allow the internet to work lol
      2. I’m a worrier. If there was an emergency, my partner needed to access the internet but couldn’t because my DNS server went down, my wireguard server went down, my ISP shit the bed, our home power went out, etc., and they forgot about the VPN, I’d feel terrible.
      3. I was a little too ambitious when I first got into self hosting. I set up services and shared them before I was ready and ended up resetting them constantly for various reasons. For example, my Plex server is on it’s 12th iteration. My partner is understandably weary to try stuff I’ve set up. I’m at a point where I don’t introduce them to a service I set up unless accessing it is no different than using an app (like the Homeassistant app) or visiting a website. That intermediary step of ensuring the VPN is on and functional before accessing the service is more than I’d prefer to ask of them

      Telling my partner to visit a website seems easy, they visit websites every day, but they don’t use a VPN everyday and they don’t care to.

      • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        5 days ago

        you’re talking to a community of admins that force their family to “use the thing”. they can’t understand why anyone can’t debug tech issues because they have surrounded themselves with people who can.

        I get it, my wife isn’t technical at all. she gets online about once a week to check email. I couldn’t even begin to explain to her how to debug her connection problems past turn it off and on again.

        so, to simplify things, she doesn’t connect to the home network outside of the home network. but I was able to teach her how to download movies/shows from Plex to her phone and I was able to explain why ads show up on her apps when she’s out of the house.

        it’s not perfect, but it’s the best I can give her with her understanding of the technology. knowing the limitations of your user base is just as important as developing the tools they will use and how they will access them.

        • a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          I get where the original commenter is coming from. A VPN is easy to use, why not have my partner just use the VPN? But like, try adding something to your routine that you don’t care about or aren’t interested in. It’s an uphill battle and not every hill is worth dying on.

          All that to say, I appreciate your comment.

      • CriticalMiss@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago
        1. I don’t think this is a problem with tailscale but you should check. Also you don’t have to pipe all the traffic through your tunnel. In the allowed IPs you can specify only your subnet so that everything else leaves via the default gateway.
        2. in the DNS server field in your WireGuard config you can specify anything, doesn’t have to be RFC1918 compliant. 1.1.1.1 will work too
        3. At the end of the day, a threat model is always gonna be security vs. convenience. Plex was used as an attack vector in the past as most most people don’t rush to patch it (and rightfully so, there are countless horror stories of PMS updates breaking the whole thing entirely). If you trust that you know what you’re doing, and trust the applications you’re running to treat security seriously (hint: Plex doesn’t) then go ahead, set up your reverse proxy server of choice (easiest would be Traefik, but if you need more robustness then nginx is still king) and open 443 to the internet.
  • lorentz@feddit.itEnglish
    7·
    7 days ago

    If security is one of your concerns, search for “HTTP client side certificates”. TL;DR: you can create certificates to authenticate the client and configure the server to allow connections only from trusted devices. It adds extra security because attackers cannot leverage known vulnerabilities on the services you host since they are blocked at http level.

    It is a little difficult to find good and updated documentation but I managed to make it work with nginx. The downside is that Firefox mobile doesn’t support them, but Firefox PC and Chrome have no issues.

    Of course you want also a server side certificate, the easiest way is to get it from Let’s Encrypt

  • tritonium@midwest.socialEnglish
    95·
    6 days ago

    Why do so many people do this incorrectly. Unless you are actually serving a public then you don’t need to open anything other than a WireGuard tunnel. My phone automatically connects to WireGuard as soon as I disconnect from my home WiFi so I have access to every single one of my services and only have to expose one port and service.

    If you are going through setting up caddy or nginx proxy manager or anything else and you’re not serving a public… you’re dumb.

    • RyeMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      What are you using to auto connect to VPN when you disconnect from your home wifi?

      • MMAniacle@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        The Wireguard iOS app has an “on-demand” toggle that automatically connects when certain conditions are met (on cellular, on wifi, exclude certain networks, etc)

  • lurklurk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    6 days ago

    Tailscale is very popular among people I know who have similar problems. Supposedly it’s pretty transparent and easy to use.

    If you want to do it yourself, setting up dyndns and a wireguard node on your network (with the wireguard udp port forwarded to it) is probably the easiest path. The official wireguard vpn app is pretty good at least for android and mac, and for a linux client you can just set up the wireguard thing directly. There are pretty good tutorials for this iirc.

    Some dns name pointing to your home IP might in theory be an indication to potential hackers that there’s something there, but just having an alive IP on the internet will already get you malicious scans. Wireguard doesn’t respond unless the incoming packet is properly signed so it doesn’t show up in a regular scan.

    Geo-restriction might just give a false sense of security. Fail2ban is probably overkill for a single udp port. Better to invest in having automatic security upgrades on and making your internal network more zero trust

  • slowmotionrunner@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    7·
    7 days ago

    5). Hey OP, don’t worry, this can seem kind of scary at first, but it is not that difficult. I’ve skimmed some of the other comments and there are plenty of good tips here.

    2). Yes, you will want your own domain and there is no fear of other people “knowing it” if you have everything set up correctly.

    1b). Any cheap VPS will do and you don’t need to worry about it being virtualized rather than dedicated. What you really care about is bandwidth speed and limits because a reverse proxy is typically very light on resources. You would be surprised how little CPU/memory it needs.

    1a). I use a cheap VPS from RackNerd. Once you have access to your VPS, just install your proxy directly into the OS or in Docker. Whichever is easier. The most important thing for choosing a reverse proxy is automatic TLS/Let’s Encrypt. I saw a comment from you about certbot… don’t bother with all that nonsense. Either Traefik, Caddy, or Nginx Proxy Manager (not vanilla Nginx) will do all this for you–I personally use Traefik unless for some reason I can’t. Way less headaches. The second most important thing to decide is how your VPS in the cloud will connect back to your home securely… I personally use Tailscale for that and it works perfectly fine.

    3). Honestly, I think Fail2Ban and geo restrictions are overdoing it. Fail2ban has never gotten me any lift because any sort of modern brute force attack will come from a botnet that has 1000s of unique IPs… never triggering Fail2ban because no repeat offenders. Just ensure your VPS has a firewall enabled and you know what ports you are exposing from Docker and you should be good. If your services don’t natively support authentication, look into something like Authelia or Authentik. Rather than Fail2Ban and/or geo restrictions, I would be more inclined to suggest a WAF like Caddy WAF before I reached for geo restrictions. Again, assuming your concern is security, a WAF would do way more for you than IP restrictions which are easily circumvented.

    4). Have fun!

    EDIT: formatting

  • yak@lmy.brx.ioEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    I came here to upvote the post that mentions haproxy, but I can’t see it, so I’m resorting to writing one!

    Haproxy is super fast, highly configurable, and if you don’t have the config nailed down just right won’t start so you know you’ve messed something up right away :-)

    It will handle encryption too, so you don’t need to bother changing the config on your internal server, just tweak your firewall rules to let whatever box you have haproxy running on (you have a DMZ, right?) see the server, and you are good to go.

    Google and stackexchange are your friends for config snippets. And I find the actual documentation is good too.

    Configure it with certificates from let’s encrypt and you are off to the races.

  • Burn1ngBull3t@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    7 days ago

    Either tailscale or cloudflare tunnels are the most adapted solution as other comments said.

    For tailscale, as you already set it up, just make sure you have an exit node where your services are. I had to do a bit of tinkering to make sure that the ips were resolved : its just an argument to the tailscale command.

    But if you dont want to use tailscale because its to complicated to your partner, then cloudlfare tunnels is the other way to go.

    How it works is by creating a tunnel between your services and cloudlare, kind of how a vpn would work. You usually use the cloudlfared CLI or directly throught Cloudflare’s website to configure the tunnel. You should have a DNS imported to cloudflare by the way, because you have to do a binding such as : service.mydns.com -> myservice.local Cloudlfare can resolve your local service and expose it to a public url.

    Just so you know, cloudlfare tunnels are free for some of that usage, however cloudlfare has the keys for your ssl traffic, so they in theory could have a look at your requests.

    best of luck for the setup !

  • markstos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    It doesn’t improve security much to host your reverse proxy outside your network, but it does hide your home IP if you care.

    If your app can exploited over the web and through a proxy it doesn’t matter if that proxy is on the same machine or over the network.

  • Breve@pawb.socialEnglish
    4·
    7 days ago

    The biggest reason to use VPN is that some ISPs may take issue with you running a web server over a residential service when they see incoming HTTP requests to your IP. If you don’t want to require VPN, then Cloudflare tunnels are perfect for this and they also solve the need for dynamic DNS if you want to use static domain because your domain points to the Cloudflare edge servers and they route it to you wherever your tunnel endpoint is running.

    Past that, Traefik is a great reverse proxy that can manage getting LetsEnrcypt SSL certificates for you even with wildcard domains and would still work fine with dynamic DNS.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      ISPs shouldn’t care unless it is explicitly prohibited in the contract. (I’ve never seen this)

      I still wouldn’t expose anything locally though since you would need to pay for a static IP.

      Instead, I just use a VPS with Wireguard and a reverse proxy.

    • a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      Do you mind giving a high level overview of what a Cloudlfare tunnel is doing? Like, what’s connected to what and how does the data flow? I’ve seen cloudflare mentioned a few other times in the comments here. I know Cloudflare offers DNS services via their 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 IPs and I also know they somehow offer DDoS protection (although I’m not sure how exactly. caching?). However, that’s the limit of my knowledge of Cloudflare

      • Breve@pawb.socialEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        Basically the Cloudflare tunnel client connects from the computer running your services (or proxy) out to Cloudflare’s edge servers and your DNS hostname is set to the IP of one of Cloudflare’s edge servers. Cloudflare acts like a reverse proxy by sending incoming SSL requests for your hostname to your tunnel client through their own network. The DNS record doesn’t expose your public IP and the Cloudflare tunnel client easily works behind firewalls, NAT, and doesn’t need a static IP because it connects outbound to Cloudflare’s network.

        The biggest limitation is that this only works for SSL traffic because it can be routed by hostname in the SNI without needing a client on the client side. They do offer tunnels for other connections, but that requires their client running on both sides so it’s more like a traditional VPN again.

  • Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    4·
    7 days ago

    On my home network I have nginxproxymanager running let’s encrypt with my domain for https, currently only for vaultwarden (I’m testing it for a bit for rolling it out or migrating wholly over to https). My domain is a ######.xyz that’s cheap.

    For remote access I use Tailscale. For friends and family I give them a relay [raspberry pi with nginx which proxys them over tailscale] that sits on their home network, that way they need “something they have”[the relay] and “something they know” [login credentials] to get at my stuff. I won’t implement biometrics for “something they are”. This is post hoc justification though, and nonesense to boot. I don’t want to expose a port and a VPS has low WAF and I’m not installing tailscale on all of their devices so s relay is an unhappy compromise.

    For bonus points I run pihole to pretty up the domain names to service.swirl and run a homarr instance so no-one needs to remember anything except home.swirl, but if they do remember immich.swirl that works too.

    If there are many ways to skin a cat I believe I chose to use a spoon, don’t be like me. Updating each dockge instance is a couple minutes and updating diet pi is a few minutes more which, individually, is not a lot on my weekly/monthly maintence respectfully. But on aggregate… I have checklists. One day I’ll write a script that will ssh into a machine > update/upgrade the os > docker compose pull/rebuild/purge> move on to the next relay… That’ll be my impetus to learn how to write a script.

    • a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      That’ll be my impetus to learn how to write a script.

      This part caught my eye. You were able to do all that other stuff without ever attempting to write a script? That’s surprising and awesome. Assuming you are running everything on a linux server, I feel like a bash script that is run via a cronjob would be your best bet, no need to ssh into the server, just let it do it on it’s own. I haven’t tested any of this but I do have scripts I wrote that do automatic ZFS backups and scrubs; the order should go something like:

      open the terminal on the server and type

      mkdir scripts

      cd scripts

      nano docker-updates.sh

      type something along the lines of this (I’m still learning docker so adjust the commands to your needs)

      #!/bin/bash

cd /path/to/scripts/docker-compose.yml
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
docker image prune -f

      save the file and then type sudo chmod +x ./docker-updates.sh to make it executable

      and finally set up a cronjob to run the script at specific intervals. type

      crontab -e

      or

      sudo crontab -e (this is if you want to run the script as root but ideally, you just add your user to the docker group so this shouldn’t be needed)

      and at the bottom of the file type this and save, that’s it:

      # runs script at 1am on the first of every month
0 1 1 * * /path/to/scripts/docker-updates.sh

      this website will help you choose a different interval

      For OS updates you basically do the same thing except the script would look something like: (I forget if you need to type “sudo” or not; it’s running as root so I don’t think you need it but maybe try it with sudo in front of both "apt"s if it’s not working. Also use whatever package manager you have if you aren’t using apt)

      while in the scripts folder you created earlier

      nano os-updates.sh

      #!/bin/bash

apt update -y && apt upgrade -y
reboot now

      save and don’t forget to make it exectuable

      then use

      sudo crontab -e (because you’ll need root privileges to update. this will run the script as root without requiring you to input your password)

      # runs script at 12am on the first of every month
0 0 1 * * /path/to/scripts/os-updates.sh
      • Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        I did think about cron but, long ago, I heard it wasn’t best practice to update through cron because the lack of logs makes things difficult to see where things went wrong, when they do.

        I’ve got automatic-upgrades running on stuff so it’s mostly fine. Dockge is running purely to give me a way to upgrade docker images without having to ssh. It’s just the monthly routine of “apt update && apt upgrade -y” *5 that sucks.

        Thank you for the advice though. I’ll probably set cron to update the images with the script as you suggest. I have a “maintenance” homarr page as a budget uptime kuma so I can quickly look there to make sure everything is pinging at least. I made the page so I can quickly get to everyone’s dockge, pihole and nginx but the pings were a happy accident.

        • a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          3·
          6 days ago

          the lack of logs

          That’s the best part, with a script, you can pipe the output of the updates into a log file you create yourself. I don’t currently do that, if something breaks, I just roll back to a previous snapshot and try again later but it’s possible and seemingly straight forward.

          This askubuntu link will probably help

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    Tailscale is completely transparent on any devices I’ve used it on. Install, set up, and never look at it again because unless it gets turned off, it’s always on.

    • a_fancy_kiwi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      I’ve run into a weird issue where on my phone, tailscale will disconnect and refuse to reconnect for a seemingly random amount of time but usually less than hour. It doesn’t happen often but it is often enough that I’ve started to notice. I’m not sure if it’s a network issue or app issue but during that time, I can’t connect to my services. All that to say, my tolerance for that is higher than my partner’s; the first time something didn’t work, they would stop using it lol

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        So I have it running on about 20 phones for customers of mine that use Blue Iris with it. But these are all Apple devices, I’m the only one with Android. I’ve never had a complaint except one person that couldn’t get on at all, and we found that for some reason the Blue Iris app was blacklisted in the network settings from using the VPN. But that’s the closest I’ve seen to your problem.

        I wonder if you set up a ping every 15 seconds from the device to the server if that would keep the tunnel active and prevent the disconnect. I don’t think tailscale has a keepalive function like a wireguard connection. If that’s too much of a pain, you might want to just implement Wireguard yourself since you can set a KeepAlive value and the tunnel won’t go idle. Tailscale is probably wanting to reduce their overhead so they don’t include a keepalive.