How much of what you self-host do you keep LAN only over making accessible across the internet?

The only externally accessible service is my wireguard vpn. For anything else, if you are not on my lan or VPN back into my lan, it’s not accessible.

55

This is the way.

9
- Funnily enough it’s exactly the opposite way of where the corporate world is going, where the LAN is no longer seen as a fortress and most services are available publically but behind 2FA.
  
  8
Can I ask your setup? I'd like to get this for myself as well.

2
- Not OP but… I have an old PC as a server, Wireguard in docker container, port-forward in the router and that’s it
  
  3
- Try pivpn. It is meant to run on a raspberry pi, but it should work on most Ubuntu and Debian based distributions.
  
  3
- Not OP, but I just use ZeroTier for this since it's dead simple to setup and free. I'm sure there's some 100% self-hosted solutions, but it's worked for me without issue.
  
  1
- Sorry, haven't logged on in a bit. I use OPNSense on an old PC for my firewall with the wireguard packet installed.
  
  Then use the wireguard client on my familys phones/laptops that is set to auto connect when NOT on my home wifi. That way media payback, adguard-home dns and everything acts as seamless as possible even when away while still keeping all ports blocked.
  
  1

Everything is behind a wireguard vpn for me. It's mostly because I don't understand how to set up Https and at this point I'm afraid to ask so everything is just http.

25

I've been using YunoHost, which does this for you but I'm thinking of switching to a regular Linux install, which is why I've been searching for stuff to replace YunoHost's features. That's why I came across Nginx Proxy Manager, which let's you easily configure that stuff with a web UI. From what I understand it also does certificates for you for https. Haven't had the chance to try it out myself tho because I only found it earlier today.

11
- NPM is the way. SSL without ever needing to edit a config file.
  
  6
- NPM is nice and easy to use.
  
  1
Its not hard really, and you shouldn't be afraid to ask, if we don't ask then we don't learn :)

Look at Caddy webserver, it does automated SSL for you.

7
- Thank you. It was mostly ment as a joke tho. I'm not actually afraid to ask, but more ignorant because it's all behind VPN and that's just so much easier and safer and I know how to do it so less effort. Https is just magic for me at the moment and I like it that way. Maybe one day I'll learn the magic spells but not today.
  
  8
- Careful with Caddy as its had a few security issues.
  
  2

Nothing I host is internet-accessible. Everything is accessible to me via Tailscale though.

22

Everything is accessible through VPN (Wireguard) only

22

Same. Always on VPN on phone for on the go ad blocking via pihole.

3
Same here. Taught my wife how to start WireGuard on her android phone and then access any of the services I run. This way I only have one port open and don't have to worry too much.

1
- That's what I do. The beauty of wireguard is that it won't respond at all if you don't send the right key. So from the outside it will appear as if none of your ports are open.
  
  2
- How about running your wireguard server on a VPS and then connecting to the same interface as clients from your mobile and home network? No ports open on your side!
  
  2

100% is lan only cause my isp is a cunt

17

Tailscale with the Funnel feature enabled should work for most ISPs, since it's setup via an outbound connection. Though maybe they're Super Cunts and block that too.

9
- Prompt: Super Cunt, photorealistic, in the style of Jill Greenberg.
  
  7
Ah, CG-NAT, is it? There are workarounds

2
- NAT to extremes.... it's Starlink so I think I'm almost completely obfuscated from the internet entirely.
  
  quite frankly i don't really host anything that needs to be accessible from the general Internet so I never bothered with workarounds.
  
  1
I had the same issue. Wrote another comment here explaining my setup to solve my ISP issue.

1

I had everything behind my LAN, but published things like Nextcloud to the outside after finally figuring out how to do that even without a public IPv4 (being behind DS-Lite by my provider).

I knew about Cloudflare Tunnels but I didn't want to route my stuff through their service. And using Immich through their tunnel would be very slow.

I finally figured out how to publish my stuff using an external VPS that's doing several things:

being a OpenVPN server
being a cert server for OpenVPN certs
being a reverse proxy using nginx with certbot

Then my servers at home just connect to the VPS as VPN clients so there's a direct tunnel between the VPS and the home servers.

Now when I have an app running on 8080 on my home server, I can set up nginx so that the domain points to the VPS public IPv4 and IPv6 and that one routes the traffic through the VPN tunnel to the home server and it's port using the IPv4 of the VPN tunnel. The clients are configured to have a static IPv4 inside the VPN tunnel when connecting to the VPN server.

Took me several years to figure out but resolved all my issues.

17

What benefit does it have instead of getting a dynamic DNS entry and port forwarding on your internet connection?

4
- With DS-Lite you don't have a public IPv4. Not a static one but also not a dynamic one. The ISP just gives you a public IPv6. You share your IPv4 address with other users. This is done to use less IPv4s. But not having a dynamic IPv4 causes you to be unable to use DynDNS etc. It's simply not possible.
  
  You could publish your stuff via IPv6 only but good luck accessing it from a network without IPv6.
  
  You could also spin up tunnels with SSH actually between a public server and the private one (yes SSH can do stuff like that) but that's very hard to manage with many services so you're better of building a setup like mine.
  
  https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/software/junos/nat/topics/topic-map/security-ipv6-dual-stack-lite.html
  
  11
I'm interested in why you're terminating TLS on your VPS instead of doing it on your home network

2

I currently keep everything LAN-only because I haven't figured out how to properly set up outside access yet.

(I would like to have Home Assistant available either over the Internet or via VPN so that automations keyed off people's location outside the home would work.)

15

I have used DuckDNS and Nginx to get Home Assistant outside but it was horrible, just constantly breaking. Around Christmas time I bought myself a domain name for a few years and Cloudflare to access it, and it's been night and day since.

Sure it cost me money but it was far cheaper than a Nabu Casa account.

3
Tailscale plugin for HA works flawlessly for me.

2
Yeah, same, except I tunneled HA out via that Cloudflare daemon. Kinda janky because I cannot use the app with it to do locations, but I can check in on the pets from anywhere.

I'm planning to set up a legit VPN sometime soon.

1
- Why can't you use the app to do locations?
  
  1
Just recommendes something that could help you to someone else here

1

There's a wid range of opinions on this. Some people only access their services via tunnel, some people open most of their services up to the internet, as long as they're authenticated. One useful option for https services is to put them behind a reverse proxy that require oauth authentication, which allows you to have services over the internet, without increasing your attack surface. But that breaks apps like Nextcloud and Lemmy, so it's not a universal option.

12

I see what the internet does to my work stuff, my home is sandboxed.

12

Plex and jellyfin are open to the web. I know the prevailing wisdom is to put them behind a vpn but the reason I host media is to share it with friend and family and nobody will fuss with your service if it involves connecting to a vpn first

12

Available to the internet via reverse proxy:

Jellyfin
Navidrome
Two websites
matrix chat server
audiobookshelf

LAN only:

homepage
NGINX Proxy Manager
Portainer

There’s more in both categories but I can’t remember everything I have running.

10

What is homepage? I'm testing homarr right now (assuming it's similar) but haven't set on it yet

1
- I believe it's this
  
  I've been eyeing it myself
  
  3
- It’s another dashboard like homarr. I set up homarr and homepage side by side to pick one and landed on homepage. No specific reason, I just gravitated to it over homarr.
  
  2

All of it is LAN only except Wireguard and some game servers.

9

Everything exposed except NFS, CUPS and Samba. They absolutely cannot be exposed.

Like, even my DNS server is public because I use DoT for AdBlock on my phone.

Nextcloud, IMAP, SMTP, Plex, SSH, NTP, WordPress, ZoneMinder are all public facing (and mostly passworded).

A fun note: All of it is dual-stacked except SSH. Fail2Ban comparatively picks up almost zero activity on IPv6.

8

Nothing outside the LAN. Just Tailscale installed on my Synology NAS, on HomeAssistant and on all my machines.

7

Unlike most here, I'm not as concerned with opening things up. The two general guidelines I use are 1. Is it built by a big organization with intent to be exposed, and 2. What's the risk if someone gets in.

All my stuff is in docker, so compartmentalized with little risk of breaking out of the container. Each is on it's own docker network to the reverse proxy, so no cross-container communication unless part of the same stack.

So following my rules, I expose things like Nextcloud and Mediawiki, and I would never expose Paperless which has identity documents (access remotely via Tailscale). I have many low-risk services I expose on demand. E.g. when going away for a weekend, I might expose FreshRSS so I can access the feed, but I'd remove it once I got home.

7

Doesn't Nextcloud running in Docker want the socket exposed?

I googled around for an example https://book.hacktricks.xyz/linux-hardening/privilege-escalation/docker-security/docker-breakout-privilege-escalation.

Ignore me if you've already hardened the containers.

2
- I've never known a reason to expose the docker socket to Nextcloud. It's certainly not required, I've run Nextcloud for years without ever granting it socket access.
  
  Most of the things on that linked page seem to be for Docker rather than Nextcloud, and relate to non-standard configuration. As someone who is not a political target, I'd be pretty happy that following Nextcloud's setup guide and hardening guide is enough.
  
  I also didn't mention it, but I geoblock access from outside my country as a general rule.
  
  2

Nearly all of them. Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, Spacebar, and 2fAuth, all set behind an NGINX Reverse Proxy, SWAG. SWAG made it very easy to set up https and now I can throw anything behind a subfolder or subdomain.

6

The only acessible element is the webserver. Fileserver, home automation, octopi, proxmox, media, etc etc are all isolate.

5

Nothing is exposed. There are things I want exposed, but I don't want to keep security patches up to date, even if there is a zero day. I'm looking for someone trustworthy to hire for things that it would be useful to expose, but they are hard to find.

4

I think it would be better if you just setup auto updating regardless

2
Just VPN back in with WireGuard.

1

Everything is accessible, but only through n2n vpn.

3

Each time I've read into self-hosting it often sounds like opening stuff up to the internet adds a bunch of complexity and potential headaches, but I'm not sure how much of it is practicality vs being excessively cautious.

3

Limiting the attack surface is a big part, geo restrictions, reputation lists, brute force mitigation, it all plays a role. Running a vulnerability scanner against your stuff is important to catch things before others do and regular patching is important too. It's can be a rewarding challenge.

6
- Can you recommend me a vulnerability scanner?
  
  3
It’s always a balance between security and convenience. You have to mitigate what risk you are willing to well…risk

4

something like 95% stays local and is remote accessed via wireguard, The rest is stuff I need to host via a hostname with a trusted cert because apps I use require that or if I need to share links to files for work, school etc. For the external stuff I use Cloudflare tunnels just because I use DDNS and want to avoid/can't use port forwarding. works well for me.

3

Just in case you missed this, you can issue valid HTTPS Certificates with the DNS challenge. I use LetsEncrypt, DeSEC and Traefik, but any other supported provider with Lego (CLI) would work.

1

I keep everything behind a VPN so I don't have to worry much about opening things up to the Internet. It's not necessary about the fact that you're probably fine but more so what the risk to you is if that device is compromised, ex: a NAS with important documents, or the idea that if that device is infected, what can that device access.

You could expose your media server and not worry too much about that device but having it in a "demilitarized zone", ensuring all your firewall rules are correct and that that service is always updated is more difficult than just one VPN that is designed to be secure from the ground up.

3

I probably have more accessible from outside than not. Many are required: hosting a website, a media server I can access from anywhere outside the house, my phone system, etc. Some I used to use more than I do now: podcast service, that sort of thing. Then a bunch that are internal only. My phone connects home over Wireguard so that's pretty convenient when out and about for accessing internal only systems.

3

Jellyfin and Miniflux are internet facing because it would be turbo annoying otherwise to deal with them

2

Only my Stremio add-ons, such as Knightcrawler, Annatar and Stremio-Jackett.

2

Only my emby and ombi containers has an open path in/out, everything else is local or VPN only

2

Most of my things are open to the web but thats kinda nessasary for them to be functional file shairing links, link shortening, mc server etc etc

2

PII or anything that would demonstrate clear attribution is LAN, the rest of the "fun" stuff lives on a VPS. Wireguard between them.

2

Everything critical is on lan (docs, passwords, media), everything else is on vps (gameserver, fediverse, websites). I dont mix these as I absolutely dont want to deal with a breakin. I assume they will get in so I airgap them more or less.

2

I have HTTPS and SSH accessible on the internet but only over IPv6. Anything else I access over an SSH tunnel or VPN.

2

I use OpenVPN and not expose anything directly.

2

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
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS	HTTP over SSL
IMAP	Internet Message Access Protocol for email
IP	Internet Protocol
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NAT	Network Address Translation
Plex	Brand of media server package
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS	Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
VPN	Virtual Private Network
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
nginx	Popular HTTP server

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2

I expose most things to the web so long as they have auth and 2FA options. The one exception being my Jellyfin server. I share it with friends and needed to make it as easily accessible as possible.

With Cloudflare WAF, reverse proxy, and an isolated subnet with IDP I feel comfortable with public services. Nothings perfect but if they get through it and pwn my lab I’ll just nuke it and rebuild.

2

As a general rule if it's a pubic-ish service like Lemmy (more a friends and family than public) or something where I want ready access like auto uploads it has public access, otherwise it's private. I make it a point to have everything facing outside to have 2FA enabled and/or limit the available sources to known IP ranges.

1

Just my Nextcloud and Matrix

1