I’ve been self-hosting Nextcloud for sometime on Linode. At some point in the not too distant future, I plan on hosting it locally on a server in my home as I would like to save on the money I spend on hosting. I find the use of Nextcloud to suit my needs perfectly, and would like to continue using the service.

However, I am not so knowledgeable when it comes to security, and I’m not too sure whether I have done sufficient to secure my instance against potential attacks, and what additional things I should consider when moving the hosting from a VPS to my own server. So that’s where I am hoping from some input from this community. Wherever it shines through that I have no idea what I’m talking about, please let me know. I have no reason to believe that I am being specifically targeted, but I do store sensitive things there that could potentially compromise my security elsewhere.

Here is the basic gist of my setup:

  • My Linode account has a strong password (>20 characters, randomly generated) and I have 2FA enabled. It required security questions to set up 2FA, but the answers are all random answers that has no relation to the question themselves.
  • I’ve disabled ssh login for root. I have instead a new user that is in the sudo usergroup with a custom name. This is also protected by a different, strong password. I imagine this makes automated brute-force attacks a lot more difficult.
  • I have set up fail2ban for sshd. Default settings.
  • I update the system at the latest bi-weekly.
  • Nextcloud is installed with the AIO Docker container. It gets a security rating A from the Nextcloud scan, and fails on not being on the latest patch level as these are released slower for the AIO container. However, updates for the container is applied automatically, and maintaining the container is a breeze (except for a couple of problems I had early on).
  • I have server-side encryption enabled. Not client-side as my impression is that the module is not working properly.
  • I have daily backups with borg. These are encrypted.
  • Images of the server are also daily backed up on Linode.
  • It is served by an Apache web server that is exposed to outside traffic with HTTPS with DNS records handled by Cloudflare.
  • I would’ve wanted to use a reverse proxy, but I did not figure out how to use it together with the Apache server. I have previously set up Nginx Reverse Proxy on a test server, but then I used a regular Docker image for Nextcloud, and not the AIO.
  • I don’t use the server to host anything else.
  • Jeena
    18•1 year ago

    For SSH I would disable login with password and only allow login with a ssh key. The other stuff sounds reasonable.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        If you have more than one VPS to manage or multiple people that need access via SSH, you may want to look into using SSH certificates instead of keys. Keys get messy when you have to wrangle a lot of them and it’s a real pain in the but if you need to revoke multiple. It does require more than just generating a key pair and giving it to the server to trust though.

        • @[email protected]OP
          2•1 year ago

          Great tip - I don’t see myself running multiple servers, and I will be the only user needing access to them, so I guess ssh keys are sufficient.