Hi all,

I’m looking at exposing some self-hosted web-based services externally so that some relatives can access them and would appreciate some advice.

Vikunja is the starting point (mostly to facilitate my spouse and I using it when away from home) but in future I want to set up Immich or similar to replace Google Photos, and that in particular will need to be shared with friends and family (especially so that immediate family can have camera uploads on automatically).

I understand that ideally I’d use SSH, a VPN, or tailscale or similar (although I don’t have experience with tailscale), but that’s not going to be feasible. Most of the family will not be able to set up those connections themselves (which means I would need to) and several are far enough away that it is impractical for me to provide on-site support or do it myself. Even if I could get a VPN or similar deployed on all their devices, I suspect that they’re going to struggle with needing to connect to it just to upload or view photos, then disconnect afterwards to resume using the Internet – I really need this to “just work” for them.

So this brings me back to safely exposing these services to the outside world. My network architecture complicates this a little, so for context:

  • Modem/router has basic firewall and points to a Raspberry Pi for DHCP. I already have No-IP set up with a domain name so that I can SSH into my LAN when away from home.
  • RPi runs Pi-hole + dnscrypt, acting as DHCP and DNS server for the network.
  • I want to use nginx as a reverse proxy running on this RPi, as I have experience with it and it can add SSL using certbot. The router would be configured to use port forwarding to direct external traffic for ports 80 and 443 to the RPi.
  • Vikunja is hosted on a separate Raspberry Pi (with other things like Shiori)
  • I have not yet determined where Immich or similar is going to go. I have existing home server that I use for backups and important family stuff, but I really don’t want this to be vulnerable to the outside world. If I were to install Immich here, I’d need it to be well-isolated from the rest of the system. The other option is to get a NUC or similar, which is what I am leaning towards as the less stressful option.

So my main questions are:

  1. Beyond fail2ban and my router’s firewall, what else can I do to protect my network once I open ports 80 and 443?

  2. How do I handle fail2ban configuration when the services are on different devices to the nginx proxy? I understand the best place to put fail2ban would be on the Pi running nginx (since it’s the access point to the outside world), but that it also needs to read the logs from Vikunja, etc. to be effective.

  3. Where would you put Immich in my network architecture?

Any other tips/recommendations for making this easy to use for my less tech-inclined friends and family would be much appreciated as well. Thanks.

  • chrash0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    5 hours ago

    i have a VPS offsite to act as a gateway. it’s just a small piece of a machine somewhere in my region that routes requests to my home network via Tailscale. this has a few benefits:

    • i don’t have to worry about my ISP changing my IP. my VPS has more stable IPs.
    • i don’t have to expose ports directly to the internet. Tailscale authenticates the connection. plus i have Caddy routing the whole system. i use subdomains like foundry.chrash.net, jellyfin.chrash.net, etc.
    • another benefit of Tailscale to point out is that you don’t need local IPs to be static either; Tailscale will allow you to access your machines by hostname or another static IP. this helps to decouple your local topology from your service network.