Hello,
Some time ago, I started self-hosting applications, but only on my local network. So far, it’s working fine, but I can’t access them as soon as I go outside (which is completely normal).
For the past few days I’ve been looking for a relatively secure way of accessing my applications from outside.
I don’t need anyone but myself to have access to my applications, so from what I’ve understood, it’s not necessarily useful to set up a reverse-proxy in that case and it would be simpler to set up a VPN.
From what I’ve seen, Wireguard seems to be a good option. At first glance, I’d have to install it on the machine containing my applications, port-forward the Wireguard listening port and configure my other devices to access this machine through Wireguard
However, I don’t have enough hindsight to know whether this is a sufficient layer of security to at least prevent bots from accessing my data or compromising my machine.
I’ve also seen Wireguard-based solutions like Tailscale or Netbird that seem to make configuration easier, but I have a hard time knowing if it would really be useful in my case (and I don’t really get what else they are doing despite simplifying the setup).
Do you have any opinions on this? Are there any obvious security holes in what I’ve said? Is setting up a VPN really the solution in my case?
Thanks in advance for your answers!
WireGuard is the fastest method, it’s free, there is no reason not to use it.
Not running anything myself but am part of a self hosting discord that swears by Netbird because its basically Tailscale but with a bunch more ease of use features apparently
Wireguard with WG Tunnel on my phone so it automatically connects when I leave my WiFi. Some Apps excluded to use it like Android Auto because it doesn’t work with an active vpn.
I run pfsense as my router on a small form factor PC with two Ethernet cards. I run Wireguard which is pretty easy to setup in pfsense. I have the client installed on my PC at work and my mobile devices. I’m never more than a click from being connected to my home network.
In the past I used ssh tunnels with port forwards to the services I wanted to access remotely.
In that case, wireguard. I only occasionally need to access a service that’s not exposed to the internet, so I use
ssh -L, but that would be quite inconvenient for your own use case.I know tailscale exists but I’ve never used it, only tried wireguard on its own. Maybe there’s some huge benefit to using it but wireguard worked fine for me.
There’s no magic bullet here. If you want good defense against bots you should use fail2ban and/or crowdsec. Geoblocking is also worth looking into. You will always have to open a port if you are selfhosting a VPN and will need to take aforementioned steps (or alternatives) to secure it. I believe Tailscale is a very good alternative for people who don’t have time to do this as it does not (to the best of my knowledge) require you to expose a port.
I use Netbird (open source networking software from a German company) as it integrates well with Authentik and allows me to use the same SSO for VPN and most of my other services. Setting it up with Authentik and Nginx is a bit complicated but very well documented in my opinion. I do not have a positive experience of the official Android client but Jetbird is a nice alternative. Setting up DNS servers and network routes through peers is quite easy. Enrollment is also a breeze due to the Authentik integration.
Netbird is very nice and easy to use. Only downside is that the iOS app drains battery like crazy :(
If your traffic is pretty low, rent a VPS for $5/month or whatever and set up a Wireguard server on it, have your devices maintain a connection to it (search keepalive for Wireguard), and set up HAProxy to do SNI-based routing for your various subdomains to the appropriate device.
Benefits:
- you control everything, so switching to a new provider is as simple as copying configs instead of reconfiguring everything
- most VPN companies only route traffic going out, not in; you can probably find one that does, but it probably costs more than the DIY option
- easy to share with others, just give a URL
Downsides:
- more complicated to configure
- bandwidth limitations
If you only need access on devices you control, something like Tailscale could work.
Benefits:
- very simple setup - Tailscale supports a ton of things
- potentially free, depending on your needs
Downsides:
- no public access, so you’d need to configure every device that wants to access it
- you don’t control it, so if Tailscale goes evil, you’d need to change everything
I did the first and it works well.
I would not recommend relying on Tailscale. They have been soliciting a lot of venture capital lately and are probably going to go for an IPO sooner or later. I would not put a lot of trust in that company. The investors are going to want their money.
Yeah, that’s the “you don’t control it” angle here. There are alternatives, but you’ll have to do a fair amount of work to switch vs something you do control (i.e. to switch to a different VPS, just copy configs and change the host config on each client, everything else is the same).
Tailscale. You can make a free account and they have clients for most things. If you want to self host, Headscale.
I self-host various applications and have been really happy with Wireguard. After watching just how hard my firewall gets hammered when I have any detectable open ports I finally shut down everything else. The WG protocol is designed to be as silent as possible and doesn’t respond to remote traffic unless it receives the correct key, and the open WG port is difficult to detect when the firewall is configured correctly.
Everything - SSH, HTTP, VNC and any other protocol it must first go through my WG tunnel and running it on an OpenWRT router instead of a server means if the router is working, WG is working. Using Tasker on Android automatically brings the tunnel up whenever I leave my house and makes everything in my home instantly accessible no matter what I’m doing.
Another thing to consider is there’s no corporation involved with WG use. So many companies have suddenly decided to start charging for “free for personal use” products and services, IMO it has made anything requiring an account worth avoiding.
Can I ask how you have this setup? Do you also have a reverse proxy setup or just WG on your router and everything gets routed via your router?
If you use Tasker only as VPN switch you could have a look at WG Tunnel from zaneschepke on Github. It has a built in function to switch to the tunnel when your local WIFI is not connected.
I’m in the same boat and currently run WireGuard to access my services. However the more I extend my stack of services, the more I have use-cases to expose certain services to friends and family. For that I’m currently looking into using Pangolin.
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Mullvad
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Mullvad
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Mullvad.
I’m guessing you are talking about port forwarding with Mullvad but they no longer support it https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports
No I am talking about creating a secure tunnel.
And why, pray tell, do you need Mullvad to do it? I want to know why you think that.
I didn’t say you need it. I strongly recommend the as a provider.
Please do enlighten me how you use Mullvad to access you self-hosted services in your home? Like OP asked for.
There is no need to pay for an external service for this and I don’t think Mullvad would work for this use case.
It does work for this use case.
You don’t need to, you can use wire guard.
Mullvad is the only VPN you can pay for with cash and actually remain untraced.
Can you explain how to make it work for this use case?
How?
Secure tunneling.
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I do have both (VPN and Reverse Proxy) running. For VPN my router uses Wireguard and at work we use Wireguard as well. You can alter the config in such a way, that only internal traffic would get routed through your VPN. I love this, because for regular traffic, I’m not bound to the upload at my home network or with work, route my personal traffic through the company internet or lose access to my own network.
Reverse proxy isn’t bad either. I have a DNS running at home, that redirects my domain used for home stuff, directly to the reverse proxy. This way I can block certain stuff, I want a fancy domain but not be accessed from the outside, because its not needed or not set up properly.
With a VPN, you would be more secure, because its a single instance you need to keep safe. With regular updates and set up properly, this shouldn’t be an issue. But I would suggest reading tech news portals, that do cover security breaches of well known software.
With a reverse proxy setup I use, I must trust so many things. I must trust my reverse proxy with the firewall and then each server I run.
But keep one thing in mind. If you for example use stuff like Home Assistant, that you access in the background, it wouldn’t work if you connect via a VPN. With Wireguard I can be connected 24/7 to my VPN, even at home. With the previous VPN my router used (I guess it was OpenVPN), this wasn’t possible.
Wireguard is the way to go. I like using wg-easy to use wireguard because its easy to set up in a docker container.
Agree, highly recommend this and/or Tailscale.
Double-pro. Running wireguard on docker assures that a native wireguard install won’t conflict with docker. Keep those iptables in the same place.
I thought I would be the only one to try this. Would you share more details on your setup? I am interested because to me Wireguard is in the kernel so how could it be in a container.
Oh yeah. https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/wireguard
Basically, docker can and does create network devices. It’s as easy for it to create wg0’s as it is to create networks for your other docker containers. If you’re going to run wireguard and docker, you’re better off to let docker handle the network routing and just run one of the various containers out there to stop them from fighting. That particular container is more general. You can run it client or server. Wg-easy, I believe is server-only, or even hide it inside other containers like docker-qbittorrent-wireguard, where it just hangs out and connects to whatever .conf you give it.
I did the whole thing in my early days selfhosting where I installed wireguard, docker, some apps, rebooted, everything breaks.
Install a wireguard container, configure it as you would, your apps, reboot… it still works, because docker isn’t conflicting with native wg-quick. It’s either this, or untangle and make an iptables setup permanent so when you reboot, it doesn’t break again.
I use a mixture of tailscale and zerotier. Both are pretty powerful.
Also a beginner here, I use Tailscale, and it’s been a very easy setup!
Tailscale is very tempting, on one hand it should provide a pretty good layer of security without too much thinking and it is “free”, and on another hand, it’s a business solution, so it is probably not really free…
Thanks for the answer anyway confirming that Tailscale is pretty easy to setup !
Headscale is an open source implementation of the Tailscale control server.
https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
Not an endorsement as I haven’t used it (I do use Tailscale), but just thought I’d point it out.
I use headscale and it’s been working wonderfully for my nightly offsite backups and remote access.
The tailscale clients are, I believe, open source. It’s just the server that’s not, and you can run the unofficial but well supported “headscale” as a server if you want. But this requires you to run this somewhere publicly accessible, like a VPS, for coordination and NAT-punching purposes.
But! I’m pretty sure as the business operates right now, that tailscale doesn’t have access to the actual data connections or anything, it’s all encrypted, they’re basically just there for simplicity and coordination. And their business model is to offer simple things for free, like small numbers of devices, with the hope that you like the service and convince your business to pay for the fancy version for money. So I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the typical “free because I’m harvesting your data” models.
That all having been said, I run headscale 😛
