I am in love with my Jellyfin server (running in a Docker container) - it feels so nice to take back control over my media consumption again, after more than a decade in the land of streaming. So much, that I want to share this with my family.
So I was thinking of setting up a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager is what I have used before) and expose my Jellyfin-instance through that. However, I’ve seen several people be skeptical about this solution, instead opting for access through a VPN (I don’t think that would be a good solution for some of my family members).
What are the potential pitfalls of setting it up this way, that makes people skeptical? Where could I go wrong, and what dangers would I expose myself to? As I understand it, this would only expose one port to the internet, direct all that traffic to the Nginx Proxy Manager, which then forwards traffic to specific ports internally on my home network, which sounds safe in my mind. Is it misconfiguration of the proxy manager I should be wary of? Or some exploits in the proxy manager?
I tried that before and was never able to get it working properly. Clients had to have server addresses changed each time they used ZeroTier instead of my LAN; ZT DNS didn’t work for me either.
Ultimately, I just shared Jellyfin through Nginix, set up aggressive IP filtering on my WAN, and handled the DNS configuration on my own hardware at home. This is essentially what OP is suggesting, and I found it much easier than ZeroTier, just “technically” less secure, but not by much if you do it right.
I’ll take a look at ZeroTier, but what you say there does seem like a little hassle.
What are the ways that the setup with Nginx is done poorly? You mention aggressive IP filtering - are you essentially just whitelisting traffic incoming IPs from the users? For DNS I was planning on using Cloudflare - I have no experience setting up anything of the kind myself.
Nginx is good for isolating your internal services from the internet, and for routing HTTP over HTTPS, but you still have to make the assumption that your internal services are secure. What I do is block all incoming connections on my firewall that don’t match my whitelist. For a long time I blocked everything but my mobile provider, my work, and my partner’s work. Lately I have been whitelisting US addresses and blocking all other countries (certbot requires incoming connections to auto renew SSL certs). I also blacklist known bad ranges just in case, although few of these are in the US anyway.
What you block and allow would depend largely on your use case, but my opinion is the more the better.
Even if Jellyfin has an unknown exploit, and even if someone thought my little home LAN was worth targeting, chances are they wouldn’t make it past my firewall anyway.
Fair enough. Not quite following what your issues are (I just setup the client, allowed it onto the network, done) and then setup a hostname to point to my server zerotier address. Other than that, nothing else needed on DNS etc. But as the old adage goes, your mileage may vary
I might not have explained it too well. My Jellyfin instance can be accessed from something like 192.168.1.123 or jellyfin.local on my home network. I can add those to the Jellyfin client on my phone. When I’m away from home with Zerotier switched on, I have to change the Jellyfin config on my phone to whatever the Zerotier address is for the server.
With Jellyfin shared over HTTPS, I just set my client to jellyfin.mynetwork.dynamicDNSprovider.com. If I’m away from home, the traffic gets routed to my WAN, Nginx catches it, and it gets forwarded to Jellyfin. If I’m on my home network, my local DNS server overrides the name and routes it directly to 192.168.1.123.
No need to change client settings; it just always works.
Gotcha - I am following you now, thanks!