I want to expose my services publicly on my own domain name, how would you guys do that?
I have seen people using Cloudflare, but I don’t want to use Cloudflare out of principle. I have also seen stuff on caddy and frp that I’ve done some rough researching.
What do you guys do?
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What I do: VPS with reverse proxy and ssh reverse tunnels from the homelab.
OG would be to understand IPv6 and use that directly. Depending on the services you plan to expose that could be a good way. Tried it some years ago, was hit and miss and I still don’t get my head around how v6 work…but that would be the most independent, standalone way.
I rent a cheap VPS with iptables routing ports through a wireguard tunnel to a peer on the local network that acts as a firewall and reverse proxy, this gives you a static IP with a local control plane and no ddns.
What’s a cheap vps you recommend?
I use a cheap racknerd vps via low end box. $12/yr.
That’s crazy cheap price. Does it really have enough bandwidth to stream jellyfin?
Most VPS are on 1Gbps connections, but even if it only has 100Mbps that’s plenty.
Is there a data cap? I’m concerned like they only allow me to pass through like a TB or so of data passing through it within a month. If you have users watching your jellyfin server every day that can surpass your limit.
Yes generally around 1TB on cheap plans. That’s a ton of data though for streaming media, if youre moving more than that getting a higher tier VPS would make sense.
Keep in mind that you wouldn’t route local traffic through it, so everything watched at home would be direct and not count.
I have a $5/mo VPS with OVH and they allow unlimited bandwidth within reason. Unless you have multiple households streaming from your server all the time, likely totally fine. If you do end up with one relative streaming 24x7, then I would look at installing the tailscale app on their TV and configuring things to connect that one user direct to your home server.
A VPS takes some learning, but IMHO, it is the “correct” answer and worthile learning.
How do you set up security on your server with the constant attacks that come with having the server public?
Yes. (Depending on load) I run a server with 10 users, probably 2-3 active at any given time. Works fine.
I hop around a lot. I’ve used Akamai (fka linode), Vultr, DigitalOcean, AWS EC2, and GCP Compute Engine. I wouldn’t recommend the last 2 anymore because fuck big tech. A lot of people will mention Oracle’s free tier, but I don’t trust anyone that looks like Larry Ellison to own a machine with a direct connection into my local network.
I resonate with you as well, so what kind of set up do you use now?
Linode has a $5/month option.
Oracle has a free tier where I run my Wireguard.
Similar here. Just a Digital Ocean droplet running Pangolin. Functions basically the same as the cloudflare tunnel it replaced.
Can expose the service directly if needed, or from behind a login page.
The basic 4 dolars one? Or something extra?
Pangolin officially says on their site :
Pangolin generally requires minimal resources to run effectively. A basic VPS with 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, and 8GB SSD is sufficient for most deployments.
If you choose a VPS with only 1GB RAM, you may need to create swap space to avoid memory pressure during installation, updates, or periods of higher traffic.
I’ve got a 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB Disk droplet for $6/mo and have no issues for my limited home use. Updates don’t really take a noticeably long time or anything, it takes maybe 45 seconds to fully bring up the docker container again after an update. But it runs just fine.
Reverse proxy is what you need. I would post instructions here but honestly they wouldnt be that good. Just search it up and follow along.
Authentication & single sign-on service
Plugged into Reverse proxy, routing to each service by name
With a wild card cert so there are no name leaks.
Make your urls unexpected. If your domain is example.com, don’t put your jellyfin server at jellyfin.example.com. Instead, use watch.example.com or telly.example.com. Anything that’s memorable to you about what the service is without using a specific brand name.
With a wildcard dns record to point all names to your IP, and a wildcard certificate that works for all names loaded on your load balancer, it becomes hard for a hacker to know what name to use to get the load balancer to send them to the service they want to hack.
If you then use a sso tool like traefik’s ForwardAuth middleware, you won’t even get to the service until you’ve first authenticated.
If you use TLS like you should, your domains will be on the internet in the certificate transparency log. Yes, you should use a wildcard cert if you want this security by obscurity, but it’s still security by obscurity.
Of course. The goal here is to not advertise. Make it hard for the bots to find you. With these steps, they can try your IP, but there’s nothing directly on your IP.
You still need proper security. Authentication is a good start, and it has the extra effect of adding an extra layer to prevent the bots from going further if they get lucky and guess a host name.
Or run an internal CA, if you’re the only one accessing the services.
I recently switched to Netbird on a VPS (on Vultr). Their reverse proxy is super easy to set up / self host. They also offer a free version that works pretty good too, I just wanted to make it difficult for myself (thats the whole point of self hosting, right? )
I have seen netbird pop around every now and again. I might try out their cloud free version first and if I like it I might try self hosting it.
So you host netbird on a vps you rent and that is used for reverse proxy? So with that reverse proxy I can have my home server be publicly accessible and I can have friends log in to my jellyfin server without having to connect to my tailnet.
My last concern is security. How is this set up good for making sure I don’t just get constantly botted and exploited?
Yup! They can either connect to your Netbird meshnet (ie, similar a tailnet) or you can reverse proxy it out to the internet (no tailnet needed)
I saw a couple comments below concerned about security, one of the nice things about Netbird is that they have reverse proxy auth built in if you want. Some stuff (Navidrome or VoidAuth for instance) only has geolocation locked down (US only) but other things that I’m either more concerned about or don’t necessarily trust being open (Paperless or Komodo for instance) have Netbird Auth and VoidAuth as sign in options before it will let me open the page. Its worked flawlessly so far, and has kept my sanity intact because I wanted some stuff publically accessible without it being OPEN.
As far as being hammer fucked, it has CrowdSec and Geolocation lockdowns so you can set it to only accept traffic from ONE location and the Crowdsec also catches everything.
Opening jellyfin up publicly is kind of asking for trouble if you ask me. I haven’t done so myself, but seen enough on this community and elsewhere to know that it’s probably not a good idea.
By all means correct me if you know more, but what I tend to see is one or two people here saying that Jellyfin devs don’t recommend exposing it publicly, only to be corrected by looking at the actual documentation. I suspect those cautioning against it are on outdated information and that Jellyfin carries much the same risk as exposing any other service.
but what I tend to see is one or two people here saying that Jellyfin devs don’t recommend exposing it publicly
I think what the devs are saying is ‘don’t expose Jellyfin to the public in an unsafe manner’. I don’t run Jellyfin, but can confirm what you’ve read here. In that vein, don’t expose anything to the public in an unsafe manner.
There is no safe manner of exposing jellyfin.
That first page says exposing it to the Internet is “not recommended”. Putting a reverse proxy in front of it does not meaningfully change the security posture. A malicious request to
http://jellyfin.homelab.com/exploitable-pagewill be sent to jellyfin in effectively the same way, whether through a reverse proxy or not. You would need a WAF set up specifically to look for relevant exploit attempts.https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
Those are some outstanding known vulnerabilities, most of them unfixed. They are not particularly severe, but it shows that thorough security is not a priority for the jellyfin devs.
I do this albeit with Tailscale. Netbird/Tailscale would act as a node of your VPN and you can configure reverse proxy routes (via
tailscale serveor Netbird’s equivalent) from the VPS edge to the homelab. You can even do SNI passthrough and have TLS terminated at your home, if you want, though this can be a bit slowerAlternatively you can even expose stuff via their servers. Tailscale Inc calls this service Funnels, and Netbird should have similar offerings. It’s kinda like Tunnels but you gotta use their domains, so a VPS acts greater as a dedicated entrypoint.
Lastly yes you’d be exposing the service to the general public internet, so some basic security is needed. Netbird has a Crowdsec module integration, might wanna look at that one and set up rules/detections. Consider putting extra auth in front of Jellyfin, use Authelia or something with an auth screen. And only expose the stuff you need, not your internal dashboard or whatever admin UI.
You’re probably misunderstanding what netbird does (unless I’m the one misunderstanding things?).
Netbird subnet is equivalent to a tailscale tailnet (for all practical purposes; they even both use wireguard and hole-punching underneath). Netbird is not a reverse proxy (which I feel is what you think based on your comment).
While Netbird is generally just one of the many alternatives to Tailscale, they also do have a Reverse Proxy feature that allows access without a Netbird client. Haven’t tested it yet, seems to be in beta.
The reverse Proxy is exactly what I use (in addition to the VPN, but I’m the only one that uses that in my group of cohorts)
Its been in Beta for a but now, but its worked perfectly for me the entire time
same
Why do you want to expose them? This might limit the solutions.
The way I do this is in 2 different ways:
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Tailscale, my server connects to tailscale so all I have to do is connect to it from my phone and I can access things remotely easily. This is the best for most things, but has the downside that others can’t access it as easily
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I have a VPS (two actually at the moment as I’m switching providers from Vultr to IONOS) that also connects to tailscale so it can access my home server through it, then using Caddy I expose the services on a subdomain of the VPS. This is what I do for things that others might want to access, or things I don’t want to have to connect to tailscale to access.
If you’re going down the second route do consider that you will need to:
- Add something like fail2ban or crowdsec to the VPS as attacks will happen.
- Same reason you should add a dedicated authentication on front of most things. While I don’t expect the auth on services to be weak, it might be more vulnerable than a dedicated authentication service. You should look into Authelia, Authentik, or similar to put on front of your services so any attacker would first have to pass that to even get to your services.
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Netbird reverse proxy: https://docs.netbird.io/manage/reverse-proxy
It’s like Tailscale, but Open Source. You can self-host the components, if you want. I just use the cloud offering. I have a domain name that resolves to my server. There’s different ways you can do auth. I just hard coded an allow list of IPs. Otherwise, devices in my Netbird network can use the private IP.
Make it publicly available to the world or just for you (and people you know)?
Publicly to the world. For example, I wanted to self host temporary file sharing and temporary link shortener to the world. Stuff like jellyfin I would have that public but only specific users would have the credentials to log in.
My router (gl-net) has a VPN server built in. I just use WireGuard client and freedns.
I personally use a vps for this stuff but my setup is standalone nginx as a reverse proxy and fail2ban and ufw
Just a reverse proxy, I was using Caddy, moved to Pangolin because it’s neat.
If you have a UniFi gateway, you can enable region based firewall on your port forward ip. This then blocks most of the world (incoming) as a first step. Then like others suggest, a reverse proxy. I use Caddy built with the Maxmind geolocation plugin, and I also run fail2ban on my exposed service.
I figure if you don’t need most of the world accessing your services, it is best to exclude them
I bought myself a Synology disk station and a domain.
Yes I use Cloudflare for DNS so I can get a wildcard domain cert using ACME.
I use the Synology supplied login portal as a web application firewall for every site I want to host with the wildcard SSL cert. Like bar.mydomain.com, mealie.mydomain.com, etc.
The Synology routes the traffic to the services hosted on other services within my network.
Anything else I don’t want open to the public web, I use the Synology supplied OpenVPN server to connect.
I also have a synology but my old gaming laptop does video transcoding better so I have it on debian right now and am figuring out the best set up to access it and self host services to access publicly
I have a Flint 2 with a vanilla install of openWRT, that hosts wireguard. I have 2 static IPs, because I thought hey running my own mail and smtp services cannot be that hard (turns out yes it is hard and not worth the time to deal). Any who I have Wireguard running on my firewall and Caddy running on one of my pi’s, it gets TLS from lets encrypt.
I have a couple of domains that Caddy uses to point things out to the world or my LAN/vLANs/VPNs. Very few of the things go out to the whole world, but if I wanted to share say a Jellyfin server with someone I could wip up a VPN that only allows Jellyfin through and points DNS to my piholes. Why do I mention my ad blocker? I mention pihole because that what hosts the A records to my domain names that Caddy can serve up, I do not remember why I set it up like this, I would have to look through my notes but pihole points “service”.domain1or2.xyz to caddy which than points to the right service.
Edit: went and looked A records are hosted on pihole for my LAN/vLANs/VPNs to prevent things needing to go out and come back just to tell devices where on my LAN services are.
Is the server at your house? Or VPS?
My server is at home
The way that I handled this, was to get a $5 VPS, and have it proxy all my traffic over wireguard. Your DNS records (and SSL cert) all point to the VPS public IP address. IPtables rules route all relevant traffic.