As I start to host more and more services on my home server, my family and friends are interested in using some of the services I host as well. Up to now, all of my services have been internal-only, and my wife and I just use Tailscale to access everything. Getting others set up with tailscale isn’t an issue, but I can only have up to 4 other users before I have to pay to add more, and I have more than 4 people I would like to have access to some of the things I host.
Right now I’m using cloudflare tunnels to make some services available externally. I’m behind CGNAT, so I’m forced to use something like tunnels or similar. I’ve always read that if you are going to open things up externally to use a reverse proxy (which I use internally), but does this still apply with cloudflare tunnels? What else should I be looking at to make sure I have everything secured properly?
For tailscale, unless you need different ACLs for every user, you could instead have additional friends share a single user and then you’re only limited by the quite high device cap. Or self-host headscale on a VPS and then there are no user limits.
A reverse proxy is just for convenice of stuff like hostnames and ssl termination. It’s not a security layer.
The proper way to do it would be to have your public stuff in a DMZ , if untrusted users (i.e. could have malware on their device) are going to access it.
Personally I use Netbird and host a tiny server in the cloud, which a local node connects to, to avoid NAT or firewall rules. Since it’s self-hosted, there is no user limit.
With being behind a CGNAT tunnels is your only option.
What about this? Pangolin is probably fine if they rent a vps.
Pangolin seconded! Been using it for over a year, not a single hiccup. Switched the moment I heard CF does not like media streams via their tunnels.
I would like to avoid paying for a VPS. I probably should have clarified in my post too that I am specifically looking for advise on securing public facing services. While I certainly could make everyone use a tailscale-like service, at this point I think securing an external service would be easier. Especially since most of these people would not be tech savvy and I don’t particularly want to play tech support for their VPN.
That’s what pangolin is. Your users don’t need to use anything special. The VPN is used internally to connect your server and the VPS. It’s not actually public facing. For the enduser it’s the same as if you used cloudflare tunnels.
One word of warning if you choose to go with Cloudflare: Using their tunnels for streaming video is technically against their TOS. It’s not really enforced most of the time, but you might run into problems, if you plan on really high usage.
An alternative service is Netbird. Open Source, based in Germany and as far as I know they don’t have this limitation
EDIT no wait, this post is about secure, not hosting/tunneling in general. This comment is off topic ig.
I would like to avoid paying for a VPS
Oracle cloud free tier, but it does have a history of randomly killing the VPS’s created.
Public ipv4 addresses are scarce, and becoming more expensive now. You are probably going to have to shell out some cash if you don’t already get one as part of your internet plan.
ngrok allows up to 1 gigabyte out. it is not a good deal compared to cloudflare tunnels. the vps with pangolin is the best option on the table if I’m going to be honest
I think this is a similar approach to Cloudflare tunneling just self hosted. I personally miss reverse proxy with my own domain, but my apartment complex forced an ISP on us that killed that.
it literally is self hosting cloudflare tunnels :)
Look into NGINX Proxy manager and DuckDNS
I use NPM internally for SSL. DuckDNS won’t work for me since I am behind CGNAT. I also already own a domain.
