A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I would go with wireguard VPN or something like cloudflare tunnels or tailscale. With wireguard you'll need to open up an external port and forward to your VPN host, but wireguard uses UDP so no one can probe it for responses. CF tunnels and tailscale you don't have to open up holes in your firewall which is nice.
You also have the option of using a proxy and opening up 443 publicly on your firewall, but unless you know what you're doing I'd leave that closed until you learn more.
Nah, that sounds complicated. Just open port 22 and forward it your server.
Trueeeeeee. Then post your ip here so you can recall it later.
127.0.0.1
Hey thats where i download my ram
There’s no place like it!
Thanks, doing that now ;) /s
Mmmmmm, tunnels sound boring haha I might try figuring out wireguard. Do you have any trusted guides on it? Or should I just google :P
Good thing about wireguard is it's really simple. Google should get it done, if you get stuck send me a DM. I started with basic wireguard, I now run firezone in docker as I like the frontend.
Yes, you can use a Cloudflare tunnel but why? Since you're into self-hosting why should you depend on some random company to tunnel your traffic when you most likely don't need it? You also have all the potential tracking, spyware, risks and "being hostage" scenarios that may come with that choice.
The following assumes your use case is a simple home server for "standard arr apps, jellyfin, pi-hole" for personal usage that sits inside your network and your objetive is to be able to access those services. If you're instead trying to host a game server / few services for friends (that doesn't really need to be "inside" your home network) there's a more complete comment with other security considerations and recommendations here.
Your basic requirements are:
Quick setup guide and checklist:
Since you're only allowing access to your services through the VPN and you've heavily restricted access to the VPN port you'll be safe. Just a side note, don't be afraid to expose the Wireguard port because if someone tried to connect and they don't authenticate with the right key the server will silently drop the packets.
Now if your ISP doesn't provide you with a public IP / port forwarding abilities you may want to read this in order to find why you should avoid Cloudflare and how to setup and alternative / more private solution.
Thanks for this awesome write-up.
Yeah, that's what I'm kind of thinking about Cloudflare, so I'm trying to set up WireGuard right now. I don't know if I'm shooting myself in the foot by trying to do in docker for now or not, but I'd rather do that before I do it on bare metal. It seems to work already, as I can see that my IP changes on my phone when I access it. Hell, I can even access my routers' dashboard. However, I still can't access the services on the server (by IP, like 192.x.x.x:8989), so I'm trying to figure that out.
May I ask, why do I need a domain if I'm going through WireGuard, which goes through the IP and port, anyway?
If your home ip changes a lot a dynamic dns provider will keep up with it so you don't constantly have to change your phone's wireguard configuration
Check out Tailscale. They have 20 machine limit on the free plan. It runs on wireguard and is pretty secure.
Tailscale Free has a 100 device limit.
Virtually its only limitation against the paid plans is the user limit. (3 users)
And network logging because it's heavy on their servers.
Also the user limit only applies to your account. You can share devices/etc with other accounts, as many others as you like.
Tailscale is awesome, and super easy to set up. I think the free tier allows up to 100 devices now!
And there's an OSS control plane replacement called Headscale although I don't know what's involved in using it. Researching and implementing it is my backup plan for when Tailscale turns to shit.
E: Just briefly parsed their docs, deployment and usage seem pretty trivial. There's no need to use forks of the clients either. You can give your Headscale url to the Tailscale clients on login and you're good to go.
I am big into self-hosting and would be happy to run my own Headscale server (I have actually) but imo it's not worth the effort.
It can be done but it requires a lot of effort and consideration to ensure the relays and routing work for when your clients are in challenging NAT scenarios. And the user experience is not as good.
Instead what I do is continue to use Tailscale but I use the Tailnet Lock feature to give signing authority to my own specified devices so any new devices must be signed off by one of those other devices.
This effectively eliminates the last point of trust where you had to trust tailscale's servers to manage authorization. The result is you don't have to worry about trusting tailscale at all, the entire system is zero trust.
The catch is if you lose those devices and the recovery keys you lose the ability to trust or add to your tailnet and your only real option is to delete all the devices and start fresh.
They also have the option to send a recovery key to their servers when you enable Tailnet Lock so support can rescue you in that scenario, but I think if you are using this feature on the first place it's because you don't want to do that so I imagine most choose not to lol
I linked to their blog post above because I think it explains the feature well. If you just want the docs they are here
Setting up headscale isn't too hard. But last time I tried, connecting the clients to it didn't work properly (on mobile). Since they are using the regular tailscale clients, they don't have much control over that.
Wireguard itself works software far, thanks anyway :)
Tailscale is amazing, I work with a small company and we were battling with our IT contractor to have a VPN running for remote work.
After a while of things not working as it should I just set up tailscaled because I was using it with my home server and it just works.
We are now on a paid plan and everyone else is using it when working remotely.
Maybe something like tailscale.
It’s just so easy.
Headscale if you want to self host.
I might, but I'm gonna explore the open source solutions first :)
I've been using Tailscale, it's lovely. But I didn't like that I had to use Google/Apple/Github to log in.
Last night I set up a Headscale server which works with the tailscale client. It's lovely as well.
I use Tailscale with their DDNS feature that generates you a domain that resolves each of your Tailnet devices when connected. You can even run a command that generates an SSL cert for your given node and you can use that to further secure it with TLS in case you don’t want to deal with untrusted cert warnings.
This is especially useful for iPhones because they won’t keep your Tailscale VPN always on, but you can configure it so that requests to specific domains will activate and use your Tailscale VPN, which you just set to that generated one.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CF | CloudFlare |
| CGNAT | Carrier-Grade NAT |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| HTTPS | HTTP over SSL |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| UDP | User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
[Thread #319 for this sub, first seen 1st Dec 2023, 09:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Make your services password protected and have some software like fail2ban that blocks people from brute-forcing passwords.
Keep your software up to date.
They are password protected. Plus, behind 2FA authelia. Plus Crowdsec (which originally made me make this post, cos I can see http probing etc on it)
Alright. I wouldn't worry too much, then. If you set it up correctly and you keep it up to date so there aren't any security vulnerabilities, you should be okay.
Of course there are arbitrary, more strict approaches. You could do monitoring. Or restrict the IP addresses the server answers to. Or put everything behind a VPN and not have it exposed in the first place. But I also have my NAS and a few internet services like Nextcloud and it's been fine, similar to this, for years.
Same, have had a few select services exposed to the internet, behind very, very complex passwords or keys, with fail2ban etc. never had an incidence.
Thanks, I'm a bit calmer now :)
It largely depends on what you mean by 'anywhere', in particular if you only want to access it from your own devices or also other people's you can only access for a minute or two and where you can't install anything.
Of course there is also the question which services you want to access, e.g. just Websites and -Applications over HTTPS or do you also want e.g. the pi-hole's DNS service to be available.
Duckdns will give you a free domain name. Run wireguard on the machine to connect remotely. Only allow WG port for remote access. Optional limit app access in your webserver to your VPN and lan ips. You can also run something like adguard home to get ad blocking. In that case set your wg server ip as the dns server ip eg 10.0.0.1 and add your ddg domain name in adguard so it will resolve without having to do an external lookup when on the lan or vpn.
If you are behind CGNAT, this might help you understand things a little better.
As said in the thread, you need some kind of tunnel that stays up and doesn't need to be fixed if the internet goes down.
Wireguard, or if wanting super easy setup, Tailscale version of Wireguard is great for this. Now you have a private IP address in your VPN network to your home server, that stays up and answers to HTTP. Next thing you need is a cheap VPS somewhere with a public IP address. When that is running, and is in the Wireguard network so you can access your home server from the VPS, you need a Nginx proxy in the public server. Either do it by hand, or use a service such as the Nginx Proxy Manager to handle the proxy setup.
How it basically works is you register a domain name (A, CNAME) to the public VPS service, then with Nginx you setup that anything coming in to the domain X should be proxied to the VPN IP address Y and port Z. Now you can add HTTPS to this domain and get a Let's Encrypt certificate for it. You can, again, do this manually with Nginx, or let Nginx Proxy Manager handle it for you.
Finally. Stay safe. If you really open services to public internet from your home, be very sure to have all the latest updates and use strong passwords in all of them. Additionally, you can use the home services directly from the Wireguard/Tailscale network by accessing them using the private IP addresses. Your computer should just be in the same network with them.
If its only you and you want best security, setup a VPN system. (Tailscale, Netbird, or others are quite easy)
If someone else should also, and you dont want everyone to have to use a VPN, then you can expose some services directly. Of course behind CGNat you need some third-party system to allow this (e.g. cloudflare or a rented server).
I am not a big fan of cloudflare, they are a huge centralized company, easily allowing tracking across websites with clear-text access and kinda discouraging learning how to secure things yourself (which you have to do anyways, because you are a service provider and only cloudflare is not enough if its still publicly accessible though them)
But in the end its your choice. They easily allow you as service provider to protect yourself from DDoS attacks or allowing IPv4 access when you are behind CGNat, things you just cannot easily do yourself, certainly not without costs.
Why so complicated? Why not just SSH? Put it on some random port, make it public key login only, and you're done.
I'd say to start with CF tunnels unless you need non-web based applications. Cloudflare tunnels require you to have a domain, though.
It has the added benefit that you have network monitoring, logging and some filtering for security that they do on top and you get to manage everything from their web interface.
be warned that the first time can be a bit confusing, but since it's done using their web interface it's easier than if you have a problem making wireguard work.
you should now be able to access your application from anywhere.
Alternatively, if you have a DNS server in your home network you can add a private IP range to your tunnel. Let's say 192.168.0.0/24. Then when you connect with their pseudo-VPN (cloudflare warp or cloudflare ONE) you can directly use your home network's ip address from that device. If you tell your device to use a local DNS server that resolves your internal services, you'll be able to connect to them that way.
Cloudflare is just so nice. Handles ssl for all your sites automatically.
You can also try looking into no-ip.