Maybe I’m using the wrong terms, but what I’m wondering is if people are running services at home that they’ve made accessible from the internet. I.e. not open to the public, only so that they can use their own services from anywhere.
I’m paranoid a f when it comes to our home server, and even as a fairly experienced Linux user and programmer I don’t trust myself when it comes to computer security. However, it would be very convenient if my wife and I could access our self-hosted services when away from home. Or perhaps even make an album public and share a link with a few friends (e.g. Nextcloud, but I haven’t set that up yet).
Currently all our services run in docker containers, with separate user accounts, but I wouldn’t trust that to be 100% safe. Is there some kind of idiot proof way to expose one of the services to the internet without risking the integrity of the whole server in case it somehow gets compromised?
How are the rest of you reasoning about security? Renting a VPS for anything exposed? Using some kind of VPN to connect your phones to home network? Would you trust something like Nextcloud over HTTPS to never get hacked?
@housepanther @effingjoe Unless you’re running a router/firewall on the edge that can act as a reverse proxy, you kind of need to port forward to a reverse proxy if you’re behind NAT.
You could use a VPS as a proxy and set up a VPN tunnel between the home server and the VPS to avoid port forwarding altogether. I do this for my mastodon and lemmy instances. My home server is of course behind NAT but there’s no need for any kind of port forwarding. I should know because I have none configured.
At that point why don’t you just run it in the vps and save the hop.