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?
if you want more users you can host headscale instead of using tailscale, users can still connect with the regular tailscale clients
additionally you can use forward auth on your reverse proxy using something like authentik so that users have to be logged in before they can even see the service itself. personally I trust authentik more than I trust all of the individual services which might not have the same level of scrutiny applied to their security. it also has the added bonus of letting your users use SSO if your services support it.