Maybe I’m using the wrong terms, but what I’m wondering is if people are running services at home that they’ve made accessible from the internet. I.e. not open to the public, only so that they can use their own services from anywhere.

I’m paranoid a f when it comes to our home server, and even as a fairly experienced Linux user and programmer I don’t trust myself when it comes to computer security. However, it would be very convenient if my wife and I could access our self-hosted services when away from home. Or perhaps even make an album public and share a link with a few friends (e.g. Nextcloud, but I haven’t set that up yet).

Currently all our services run in docker containers, with separate user accounts, but I wouldn’t trust that to be 100% safe. Is there some kind of idiot proof way to expose one of the services to the internet without risking the integrity of the whole server in case it somehow gets compromised?

How are the rest of you reasoning about security? Renting a VPS for anything exposed? Using some kind of VPN to connect your phones to home network? Would you trust something like Nextcloud over HTTPS to never get hacked?

  • somedaysoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    142·
    2 years ago

    Unless you need to share/provide services for a public, then you shouldn’t be setting up reverse proxies or cloudflare tunnels in my opinion. All you need is WireGuard for you and the handful of users that might be using it.

    I have two ports open for:

    1. WireGuard

    2. SSH Tunnel

    Both of these services will only accept key based authentication.

    WireGuard is the main way that my wife and me access the services away from home. When our phones disconnect from our home’s SSID, Tasker automatically connects to the WireGuard tunnel so we never lose access to services.

    The SSH tunnel is just a fallback in case I get behind a firewall that might be doing DPI and blocking VPN traffic. The SSH tunnel operates on 443 to hopefully appear to be SSL traffic and allowed through. I’ve used it a very limited amount of times to get out from strict corporate firewalls.

    • witten@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Why not use Wireguard from your phones all the time, even at home? Just performance?

        • witten@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I don’t know about your particular use case, but I’ve found that some apps experience problems when the IP address of a resource they’re using changes out from under them. Like either they experience temporary connectivity issues during the transition or even just stop being able to reach the resource until restarted. However if your setup is working for you, that’s great!

          • somedaysoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Yeah, I haven’t had any problems with it, what apps have been an issue for you?

            The app that I use the most during that transitional period would be Ultrasonic which would be streaming music from the Airsonic service as I get in my vehicle and drive away or arrive back home. But even that flawlessly transitions without skipping a beat since it is set to cache songs.

            • witten@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              The app that comes to mind as having problems with changing IPs is the Home Assistant app. It would simply lose connectivity when the IP changed and never do another DNS lookup to connect again… I always had to restart it. The “solution” for me was not to change IPs and just leave Wireguard on. It’s cool that Ultrasonic handles it though.

              • somedaysoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                Interesting, yeah, maybe report it as an issue on github, I use a browser link to my dashboard for Home Assistant instead of the app so it hasn’t happened to me. I almost installed it the other day to get presence detection but decided on another way.