The more I am selfhosting the more ports I do open to my reverse proxy.
I also have a VPN (wireguard) but there are also 3 family members that want to access some services.
Open ports are much easier to handle for them.
How many users do you have and how many ports are open?
My case: 4 users (family)/ 8 reversed proxy ports
How many users and open ports have you?
You’re comparing apples and oranges, reverse proxy and VPN serve two different purposes.
Though in this context they’re both being used to provide safe access to local hardware from the internet.
They probably want the pros vs cons of this specific situation
Probably the usual. 80/443, wireguard, a couple game servers.
For those of you who staunchly put your open ports on a VPS and wireguard tunnel it back to your home server, are you firewalling that wg connection to only allow specific traffic?
Wireguard, as only a handful of people need access to the services, I manage it manually - and not with Tailscale or something similar.
With that my server looks nothing like a server from the outside, as I’m exposing nothing - Wireguard doesn’t even show up in a port scan
I like this approach, but I’m currently sitting in a foreign hotel who’s wifi seems to block WG. Annoying. Keep a TLS-protected reverse proxy for things you might need through obscure networks.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption SSO Single Sign-On 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) nginx Popular HTTP server
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Anything that is exposed is done through nginx proxy manager and 2FA is enforced on those apps either through the app or through Authelia.
Some of the exposed apps are shared with friends and family so easier to expose securely than mess with VPN for them.
Anything else is only accessible via VPN on my router.
I need to look at tailscale.
Currently I expose port 22 for SSH, 443 for Nginx and a couple extra for Syncthing (to mirror my media files between a Hetzner Storage Box and my NAS at home).
There’s a specific setup I tried to build once but didn’t manage:- Expose only Wireguard port from my VPS
- make it so that when (and only when) a device is connected to the VPS via Wireguard, then
mydomain.xyz
will target the VPS’ IP (and therefore hit my Nginx proxy which redirects to my various services atmyservices.mydomain.xyz
.
I tried by having a Adguard Home running on that same VPS, and setting its IP as the
DNS
in the wg0.conf that goes on the client device but it didn’t work.I’ve got a reverse proxy for stuff I want to be able to hit from the outside. It’s behind an SSO portal with 2fa (hardware token). Then for everything else I VPN in.
What are you using for SSO?
Caddy Reverse Proxy with Basic Auth for services which are critical like my 3d printer. Without auth for other services like my website or jellyfin and such. I use docker for everything so that’s another layer of safety for me.
I have port 443 open and use subdomains for most stuff. Some other ports for non-HTTP services but I don’t have any right now.
Tailscale with reverse proxy, nothing publicly exposed
Do you even need a reverse proxy if you’re using Tailscale? What advantage does it give you over setting up your DHCP correctly such that you can access your services by hostname?
Because I have my own custom domain internally and don’t use tailscale while on I’m on my network physically. But I get the best of both worlds, however I do have Tailscale setup with DNsMasq to set to my domain name anyway instead of using the Tailscale domain
Reverse proxy and allowing connection only to IPs from my country.