Opening your router to the Internet is risky. Are there any guides for the basics to keep things secure? Things like setting up fail2ban? My concern is that I’ll forget something obvious.

Edit: I haven’t had much of a chance to read through everything yet, but I really appreciate all these long, detailed responses. ❤️ Thanks folks!

  • @TCB13English
    6•1 month ago

    Oh well, If you think you’re good with Docker go ahead use it, it does work but has its own dark side…

    cause its like a micro Linux you can reliably bring up and take down on demand

    If that’s what you’re looking for maybe a look Incus/LXD/LXC or systemd-nspawn will be interesting for you.

    I hope the rest can help you have a more secure setup. :)

    Another thing that you can consider is: instead of exposing your services directly to the internet use a VPS a tunnel / reverse proxy for your local services. This way only the VPS IP will be exposed to the public (and will be a static and stable IP) and nobody can access the services directly.

    client —> VPS —> local server

    The TL;DR is installing a Wireguard “server” on the VPS and then have your local server connect to it. Then set something like nginx on the VPS to accept traffic on port 80/443 and forward to whatever you’ve running on the home server through the tunnel.

    I personally don’t think there’s much risk with exposing your home IP as part of your self hosting but some people do. It also depends on what protection your ISP may offer and how likely do you think a DDoS attack is. If you ISP provides you with a dynamic IP it may not even matter as a simple router reboot should give you a new IP.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 month ago

      I think there’s a lot of risk exposing your home IP with services behind it. Last time I did it, within minutes the router got slammed with requests trying to break into services. It actually impacted router performance.

      Great writeup!

      • @TCB13English
        1•1 month ago

        That looks like a DDoS, for instance that doesn’t ever happen on my ISP as they have some kind of DDoS protection running akin to what we would see on a decent cloud provider. Not sure of what tech they’re using, but there’s for certainly some kind of rate limiting there.

        1. Isolate the server from your main network as much as possible. If possible have then on a different public IP either using a VLAN or better yet with an entire physical network just for that - avoids VLAN hopping attacks and DDoS attacks to the server that will also take your internet down;

        In my case I can simply have a bridged setup where my Internet router get’s one public IP and the exposed services get another / different public IP. If there’s ever a DDoS, the server might be hammered with request and go down but unless they exhaust my full bandwidth my home network won’t be affected.

        Another advantage of having a bridged setup with multiple IPs is that when there’s a DDoS/bruteforce then your router won’t have to process all the requests coming in, they’ll get dispatched directly to your server without wasting your router’s CPU.

        As we can see this thing about exposing IPs depends on very specific implementation detail of your ISP or your setup so… it may or may not be dangerous.