In my home network, I’m currently hosting a public facing service and a number of private services (on their own subdomain resolved on my local DNS), all behind a reverse proxy acting as a “bouncer” that serves the public service on a subdomain on a port forward.
I am in the process of moving the network behind a hardware firewall and separating the network out and would like to move the reverse proxy into its own VLAN (DMZ). My initial plan was to host reverse proxy + authentication service in a VM in the DMZ, with firewall allow rules only port 80 to the services on my LAN and everything else blocked.
On closer look, this now seems like a single point of failure that could expose private services if something goes wrong with the reverse proxy. Alternatively, I could have a reverse proxy in the DMZ only for the public service and another reverse proxy on the LAN for internal services.
What is everyone doing in this situation? What are best practices? Thanks a bunch, as always!
Right, I could have been more precise. I’m talking about security risk, not resilience or uptime.
“It’ll probably be the most secure component in your stack.” That is a fair point.
So, one port-forward to the proxy, and the proxy reaching into both VLANs as required, is what you’re saying. Thanks for the help!
It depends on the trade-offs you want to make. If you want to maintain one less Nginx install with a little more risk, that’s a way to go.
If your priority is security, use a separate proxy for your private services and do allow your public VLAN access into your private VLAN.
My home network only has public services on it right now, but now you are making me think I should segment it further if I want to host any truly private services there.
The answer seems to always be “not segmented enough”. ;)