Hey all,
I’m setting up a homeserver and trying to figure out the best way to access it remotely. I’ve been looking at different solutions, but I’m a little stuck.
I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP when I’m also trying to use a commercial VPN for privacy / to combat services fingerprinting me based on my IP.
I’m currently considering a reverse proxy setup with an authentication provider like authentik or authelia, but as far as I understand, that wouldn’t work well with accessing services through an app on my mobile device (like for jellyfin music for example.) I did think about just opening up the ports and using a DDNS with a reverse proxy, but is’nt that like a big security risk?
Keep in mind I am no network admin, but I don’t have anything against learning if someone can point me in the right direction.
Also I heard some people say that on proxmox you should use unprivileged containers instead of vms for your services, does that hold up?
Any recommendations for tools or approaches?
Tailscale’s free offering goes a long way.
Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN, which I would still like to use. The way I understand it, if I routed my entire network through tailscale to my server, it would essentially make all my internet traffic exit at my server. So, everything would still appear to be coming from my home IP address. I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.
I have all my services spun up in docker containers, which makes it easier to pick and choose which services use Tailscale and which use a VPN. I guess I haven’t yet been put in a position where I wanted one to use both.
How about Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust? The caveat being that you have to own a domain that you can change the nameservers to the ones Cloudflare assigns you. You can purchase a domain from Cloudflare, but I think a lot of people get one from NamesCheap or PorkBun. I purchased on for less than $5 USD. With Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust, you don’t have to open ports, fiddle with NAT, or any of that. You install it on your server and it punches a hole in to allow communication.
Some people like Cloudflare, some people don’t. Personally, I’ve never had any issues except for a very brief downtime a while back.
I don’t have an exit node in my tailnet. Through the magic of routing, tailnet stays in tailnet and vpn stays in vpn. I got extra fancy and used gluetun to handle docker vpn traffic, but only for some ports of some containers.