Hey all,
I’m setting up a homeserver and trying to figure out the best way to access it remotely. I’ve been looking at different solutions, but I’m a little stuck.
I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP when I’m also trying to use a commercial VPN for privacy / to combat services fingerprinting me based on my IP.
I’m currently considering a reverse proxy setup with an authentication provider like authentik or authelia, but as far as I understand, that wouldn’t work well with accessing services through an app on my mobile device (like for jellyfin music for example.) I did think about just opening up the ports and using a DDNS with a reverse proxy, but is’nt that like a big security risk?
Keep in mind I am no network admin, but I don’t have anything against learning if someone can point me in the right direction.
Also I heard some people say that on proxmox you should use unprivileged containers instead of vms for your services, does that hold up?
Any recommendations for tools or approaches?
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Personally, i would use VPN, Pihole for Local-DNS Records and a simple Local Reverse Proxy to address my Network-Services. I wouldnt open anything from my Homelab to the Internet.
Cloudflare Tunnels work great and are really easy to setup. Plus you are not exposing you machine completely to the outside, as the cloudflared service/container „calls out“, and Cloudflare is your reverse proxy. Downside is, you’re binding yourself to one of the US hyperscalers.
Pangolin uses the same principle, but is a bit more challenging to setup. Plus you need some kind of cloud server to make it work.
As you already have a VPN active at all times (at least it sounds like that), a VPN home seems out of the picture.
Unless you have a dedicated firewall at home, maybe reconsider the reverse proxy route. Personally would not feel comfortable with exposing a machine at home to the internet in full without a handle on what it can do or how it may be reached.
As you already have a VPN active at all times (at least it sounds like that), a VPN home seems out of the picture.
Expand on that, if you would. I run local VPN and everything else through Cloudflare. In fact the VPN DNS is Cloudflare as well as the stand alone pFsense firewall. Perhaps I am misunderstanding, which is likely since I’m all drugged up trying to pass a kidney stone.
Well, not every system can handle or support multiple VPN connections with different providers, or the VPNs could interfere with each other. E.g. when using Tailscale you can not use another WireGuard based VPN according to their FAQs.
Also, it adds complexity to the stack and system as a whole on the client side. That is all fine and dandy as long as it works, but quickly a pain in the butt once you have to debug something.
when using Tailscale you can not use another WireGuard based VPN according to their FAQs.
Anecdotally, if I turn off the Advanced killswitch and The VPN killswitch of my main VPN, I can actually bring up Tailscale. But you are right, it does add complexity. Basically I use Tailscale on the server and pFsense firewall as an overlay VPN. It’s also handy if you lock yourself out of the server. A ‘backdoor’ of sorts.
I run my instance using cloudflare tunnels, directly from my thinkpad (over wifi), these tunnels are helpful because you don’t need to open ports, etc, also, there are other tunneling options, like hosting a server on a VPS that tunnels to your own selfhosted server, as there are some alternatives to cloudflare in that aspect.
Idk, might be an option.
Tailscale’s free offering goes a long way.
Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN, which I would still like to use. The way I understand it, if I routed my entire network through tailscale to my server, it would essentially make all my internet traffic exit at my server. So, everything would still appear to be coming from my home IP address. I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.
Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN
You can split your devices traffic, Tailscale traffic through Tailscale, everything else through your masking VPN.
I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.
For that, what I would do is put the masking VPN (like PIA or whatever) on your router (not all routers can do this) and then have Tailscale on the devices or individual services. In theory, everything would still be able to talk to each other (even if your mobile device is not behind the router), but everything that is behind the router would enter and exit their traffic wherever you have the masking VPN set to. Downside of doing this is that EVERYTHING that is behind that router is also behind that VPN which can cause problems with some services, like banking and streaming.
It would also mean that the only way you could host a public service is to have an external VPS acting as a reverse proxy. Cloudflare might also have something that could work around this setup, but I’m not familiar with their offerings.
This setup also doesn’t mask your traffic (origin and destination) from your mobile provider (just your home ISP), but that is a harder nut to crack as they can see, real time, where you are physically, and depending on your device, may have deeper device access anyways. I’m thinking prepaid phones and phones bought from the carrier (at least here in the US) or if your carrier has “asked” you to install an app to manage your account. My assumption is that my mobile provider can see anything I do while I have my phone or tablet with me, and just work around that.
You might want to ask in !privacy@lemmy.ml and !privacy@lemmy.world, as this is more up their alley.
I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.
How about Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust? The caveat being that you have to own a domain that you can change the nameservers to the ones Cloudflare assigns you. You can purchase a domain from Cloudflare, but I think a lot of people get one from NamesCheap or PorkBun. I purchased on for less than $5 USD. With Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust, you don’t have to open ports, fiddle with NAT, or any of that. You install it on your server and it punches a hole in to allow communication.
Some people like Cloudflare, some people don’t. Personally, I’ve never had any issues except for a very brief downtime a while back.
I have all my services spun up in docker containers, which makes it easier to pick and choose which services use Tailscale and which use a VPN. I guess I haven’t yet been put in a position where I wanted one to use both.
I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP when I’m also trying to use a commercial VPN for privacy / to combat services fingerprinting me based on my IP.
My ASUS WRT router (running Merlin Firmware) forwards my Home WireGuard VPN server through one of my Proton VPN clients, I get all the added bonuses of being connected to my home network, utilizing my PiHole an such, while benefiting from appearing across the world.
I’m currently considering a reverse proxy setup with an authentication provider like authentik or authelia, but as far as I understand, that wouldn’t work well with accessing services through an app on my mobile device (like for jellyfin music for example.)
This is correct, you cannot host an authentication service in front of Jellyfin’s proxy otherwise the Jellyfin Media Player will not connect to your server however, there is a Jellyfin SSO plugin for authentication which is what I use and I disabled the manual login form via CSS but be warned if you take this route that the CSS can be re-enabled on the login screen using your browsers element inspect, I wish you can disable it outright but it’s heavily baked into Jellyfin from what I’ve read.
I suggest setting up a IP-Blacklist for Jellyfin and only whitelisting the known IP’s.
My recommendation is a VPN server to connect in from outside and have the default gateway for the VPN clients be a server that acts as a router that’s set up with your commercial VPN.
That way, you can be outside on a phone or a computer, access your internal network and still have your public internet traffic go out through your commercial VPN without having to be able to configure multiple VPN connections at once (eg. Android doesn’t support that).
Eg. 2 debian proxmox containers. One that runs wireguard (head/tailscale might also work here?) for external access and one that runs mullvad(or whoever) VPN cli and IP forwarding to be the gateway for your clients.
Only downside is the extra hops to send everything through your home network first rather than straight to the commercial vpn which is probably fine depending on your speeds. You can always disconnect and connect directly to the commercial VPN for faster internet traffic if you need to.
For the unprivileged container thing, containers tend to be lighter on resources than VMs at the cost of a little isolation (they share the same kernel as proxmox which could have security implications).
The ability for lxc containers to run unprivileged with all the restrictions that entails alleviates a bit of that security risk.
Both options are generally considered pretty secure but bugs/vulnerabilities could break isolation in either case. The only real 100% safe isolation is bare metal.
I tend to run containers unless I have a really good reason to need a VM, and run unprivileged unless I have a really really good reason not to.
Personally, I use headscale (self-hosted tailscale) that is open to the internet. Then my phone and all other devices use tailscale clients to connect to that. All my other services are accessed through the tailscale magic DNS service.
Nothing except headscale is open to the internet, and I can access anything I need on the server and other devices. It also doesn’t just route All traffic through my server, only the stuff to other tailscale nodes.
Then just recently I’ve been using Nginx proxy manager and my DNS to make nicer names instead of memorizing a dozen ports for random services I host :p
NGINX Proxy Manager and DuckDNS.
Get DuckDNS set up first.
Then go to DuckDNS.org and register a domain.
Then go into NGINX proxy manager.
It’s pretty straightforward, click “add proxy host”, then type the domain from duckdns (I like to do a different subdomain for each service, ie: calibre.mydomain.duckdns.org, homeassistant.mydomain.duckdns.org, etc.) and point it at your container with the service you want to access remotely.
You’ll want to enable let’s encrypt. But other than that the defaults should be fine.
Don’t do this just use tailscale, it’s 100% easier and very fool proof
If you’re running insecure services, you can restrict them to be accessible by vpn. I have a mix of internet accessible and vpn accessible services using the tailscale nginx plugin.
If you want to send all your traffic over a vpn, you will either need to route all your traffic through your own vpn or use some sort of multiplexed vpn. tailscale can do this with mullvad, but it’s not yet possible with headscale.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation PIA Private Internet Access brand of VPN PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) SSO Single Sign-On VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
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I’ve been using frp to create a reverse proxy between my NAS at home and a DigitalOcean droplet. Been using it for over a year now, and not had any issues.
Thanks for asking! I have the same problem, so eager to read the comments. Could you share what you choose in the end and why?
