Hi all,

I’m looking at exposing some self-hosted web-based services externally so that some relatives can access them and would appreciate some advice.

Vikunja is the starting point (mostly to facilitate my spouse and I using it when away from home) but in future I want to set up Immich or similar to replace Google Photos, and that in particular will need to be shared with friends and family (especially so that immediate family can have camera uploads on automatically).

I understand that ideally I’d use SSH, a VPN, or tailscale or similar (although I don’t have experience with tailscale), but that’s not going to be feasible. Most of the family will not be able to set up those connections themselves (which means I would need to) and several are far enough away that it is impractical for me to provide on-site support or do it myself. Even if I could get a VPN or similar deployed on all their devices, I suspect that they’re going to struggle with needing to connect to it just to upload or view photos, then disconnect afterwards to resume using the Internet – I really need this to “just work” for them.

So this brings me back to safely exposing these services to the outside world. My network architecture complicates this a little, so for context:

  • Modem/router has basic firewall and points to a Raspberry Pi for DHCP. I already have No-IP set up with a domain name so that I can SSH into my LAN when away from home.
  • RPi runs Pi-hole + dnscrypt, acting as DHCP and DNS server for the network.
  • I want to use nginx as a reverse proxy running on this RPi, as I have experience with it and it can add SSL using certbot. The router would be configured to use port forwarding to direct external traffic for ports 80 and 443 to the RPi.
  • Vikunja is hosted on a separate Raspberry Pi (with other things like Shiori)
  • I have not yet determined where Immich or similar is going to go. I have existing home server that I use for backups and important family stuff, but I really don’t want this to be vulnerable to the outside world. If I were to install Immich here, I’d need it to be well-isolated from the rest of the system. The other option is to get a NUC or similar, which is what I am leaning towards as the less stressful option.

So my main questions are:

  1. Beyond fail2ban and my router’s firewall, what else can I do to protect my network once I open ports 80 and 443?

  2. How do I handle fail2ban configuration when the services are on different devices to the nginx proxy? I understand the best place to put fail2ban would be on the Pi running nginx (since it’s the access point to the outside world), but that it also needs to read the logs from Vikunja, etc. to be effective.

  3. Where would you put Immich in my network architecture?

Any other tips/recommendations for making this easy to use for my less tech-inclined friends and family would be much appreciated as well. Thanks.

  • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    Thanks for evaluating! The exploit was explained to me that an unpriviliged user/Programm could use it to get root access on the whole system, which I my mind included the hypervisor. Further reading seems to proof you right, while containers were broken VMs were not.

    My point still remains, although weaker: If you know exactly what you are doing you can get a system quite secure, if you are a hobby server owner like me, its not that easy. I would have not know that the use of VMs instead of containers has sooo major security implications, that something so fundamental as ssh could be exploited in such large scales, and clustering would have been needed to avoid being unsafe.

    Sure, noone would use an zero day on me targeted, the thing is: I am not working in the field, from publishing of the exploit till learned about it and had the time to patch, there were a few weeks. If in those few weeks someone deploys a tool going for mass and not for single targets, I would probably be infected and added to some botnet, cryptominer or whatever.

    If I have a bare metal dedicated server, which has only access to IPs contained in my whitelist on a dedicated opnsense, I have less to wory about. Sure, someone could still find a openbsd/opnsense exploit and get me, but my point is: complex systems break in complex ways, the more complex systems you use, the more attack surface u have, need to know and understand to control and mitigate it.

    Not that its impossible, but for a hobbyist who tries to self teach with man pages, tutorials and forums, you can get pwnd in unexpected ways (like because you used a container for dodgy Chinese smart home devices and expected that your production environment would be safe even if one of them was malicious, but in fact you were not, because that would have needed to be a VM. AND: before copy fail was published, users would have probably also told you that containers are safe.