2w ago

Round Two: Can I manage to set up Jellyfin correctly this time?

Hi y’all, thanks for the help with my question yesterday. I did a bit of homework, and I think I’ve got things figured out. Here’s my revised plan:

configure a cron job to update DuckDNS with my IP address every 5 minutes
use ufw to block all incoming traffic, except to ports 80 and 443, to allow incoming traffic to reach Caddy
configure the Caddyfile to direct traffic from my DuckDNS subdomain to Jellyfin’s port

Does this seem right this time? Am I missing anything, or unnecessarily adding steps? Thanks in advance, I’ll get the hang of all this someday!

42 comments

I still don't recommend putting jellyfin on the Internet. It's not designed for it. There are some API endpoints you can access without authentication, not to mention potential authentication bypass vulnerabilities.
5 minutes is also probably too frequent. Leases are usually significantly longer. You might hit a rate limit and get blocked.
- Thanks for the tip! I’ll back the refresh rate off to be safe.
  I’m not sure I entirely understand your concern about putting Jellyfin on the internet. A large part of my interest in selfhosting is being able host my own music library, my own cloud storage, etc, and access it as an alternative to Spotify or Google Drive. Doesn’t that inherently mean that they need to be on the internet, if I want to be able to access them when I’m away from home?
  My goal has been to find a way to do that safely, but if that’s not possible, that’s good to know too, so I don’t keep trying to do the impossible.
  
  Wireguard or tailscale are much better ways of accessing jellyfin from outside your network.
  
  It's honestly just a matter of how much risk you are comfortable with for using jellyfin on the open internet.
  (If i remember correctly:) The unauthenticated routes thing can only be used for streaming your content without a login (if you can guess the contents ids on your server I believe).
  In my opinion, it's not worth the hassle of using a vpn because I don't think this risk is worth mitigating with one.
  But everyone has their own personal risk assesment of course.
  P.s. Easier than a VPN, at least for logging in other users, would be to use some type of proxy authentication like Authelia. I believe jellyfin has a plugin you can use. It can be complicated to setup, but it's an option. I believe it should protect all routes exposed by jellyfin so that solves the unauthenticated streaming issue. (I still dont think this is necessary but more choice for the risk-adverse!).
  https://github.com/authelia/authelia
  
  I just finished refining my Jellyfin setup. I use caddy as reverse proxy and use authelia as authentication in front of Jellyfin. This way only users logged in to authelia can access my Jellyfin. And there is an SSO plugin for jellyfin to avoid double login. The tricky part was getting apps to work.
- It’s not designed for it
  Yet everyone in here tells everyone to switch from Plex, which is designed for it, to jellyfin lol
  
  I prefer security vulnerabilities I can manage to privacy ones I cannot.
  
  Only one of these software has lead to someone hacking into someone's computer.
If it's for your personal use and no one else is going to connect, why don't you just configure a wireguard tunnel to remotely connect to your server as if you were in LAN without exposing anything?
- I’d like to be able to share it with friends and family
  
  Tailscale has the Funnel feature too, which puts the endpoint on Tailscale's servers.
  You could do both - Funnel for people who you don't want to walk through setting up a client, and use the client for those who you're willing to put the effort into.
  
  Tailscale allows you to do the same except you can create keys with limited access to only certain ports (just in case you don't want them peeking around your server).
- Meh, I won't expose ports anymore - last time I did I had someone hammering on it hard enough to slow my consumer router.
  I closed the port and would still have someone hammer it occasionally for months, hoping the port was still open.
  
  Just for my own education, if you don’t mind - how were you able to tell someone was hammering on the port if it was closed? Would fail2ban have been an option to stop them?
- Haha okay, thanks! And I’d just forward ports 80 and 443 from the router to ports 80 and 443 on the Pi’s internal IP address in the router settings, right?
- If it doesn’t have to be exposed, then it shouldn’t be exposed. A Webserver should be exposed: Nginx and co are working on it for decades. Jellyfin on the other hand is a much smaller project, and chances for security issues are significantly higher.
It's perfectly fine to host jellyfin online. Use a proxy server to enable TLS and do not use default ports 80/443. Use letsencrypt for free certificates. No need for VPN to access here either. Do not expose any other ports such as SSH on default ports. Lock down your jellyfin server and any other related services behind a VPN service and block access to Internet through other interfaces (except for port forwards on your ISP for jelly). Go high on port ranges since they typically aren't scanned or blocked. Go dual stack for best results and don't use your router address for IPv6 more than likely you have your own /64 choose a different address for port forwards. Do not assign this address to your internal servers. Use a reserved unrouted IPv6 range internally and do NAT6. Do not allow any raw IPv6 internet access
- do not use default ports 80/443.
  In my opinion, you'd be fine using default ports. Guess there's no harm in using other ports though, other than the pain of having the remember which port to use if you ever forget when adding a new device, etc.
  Edit: I should add that im speaking of only ports 80/443 here. If you must expose ssh over the internet (probably shouldnt) for example, then yes, use a non-standard port (I use non standard ports for pretty much all apps except http/s).
- Do not expose Jellyfin. It has unauthenticated endpoints that will be exploited by bots
You don't need to hard update your IP every 5 minutes. The typical DNS updaters (just use ddclient) can simply check if your IP is up to date and only update if it isn't.
I forgot duckdns still exists to be fair

42 comments