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!
Tailscale. You can make a free account and they have clients for most things. If you want to self host, Headscale.
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.
Run WireGuard on some home machine. (Does not need to be the machine the app you want to access is hosted on.)
Run WireGuard on your road warrior system.
There is no step 3.
I’m doing this right now from halfway around the world from my house and it’s been great. Been using iPhone, iPad, and macOS clients connected to linuxserver/WireGuard docker container. Been doing this on many WiFi networks and 5G, no difference.
Is wire guard a service you pay for? Otherwise how does wire guard in your home machine not need your router to forward ports to it? And then the remote client need to be pointed at your home’s external IP?
WireGuard is free. Obviously my instructions didn’t go into detail about specifically how to set everything up. Port forwarding is required. Knowing your servers external IP address is required. You also need electricity, an ISP subscription, a home server (preferably running Linux), so on and so forth. This is /c/selfhosted after all.
Yeah that’s fine. The steps were so simple I figured they could work without router config changes if they made some kind of connection handshake in a third party service’s server.
But given all that, I wonder if it makes sense to look into if your router has its own vpn server (or flash the firmware with one that does.)
Doesn’t that need like a static IP address, port forwarding and dealing all kind of network annoyances?
Recommending wireguard to people feels like recommending Arch to first time Linux users.
You don’t need a static IP address, but you do need a public IP address. You can use dynamic DNS to avoid having to keep track of your IP address. FreeDNS will work fine for a basic setup.
Wireguard is one of the easiest VPN servers to use. If you’re not using your ISP’s router, it may even have Wireguard built in.
Apologies for the dumb noob question, but if your iOS device is VPNed to your home server, how does it access the open internet? Does it do this via the VPN?
WireGuard routes certain traffic from the client (your iPhone) through the server (the computer at your house). If you route all traffic, then when your iPhone accesses the internet, it’s as if you were at home. Since that WireGuard server is sitting on your home LAN, it is able to route your phones traffic to anything else on that LAN, or out to the internet.
Wireguard clients have a setting called AllowedIPs that tells the client what IP subnets to route through the server. By default this is
0.0.0.0/0, ::/0, which means “all ipv4 and all ipv6 traffic”. But If all you want to access are services on your home LAN, then you change that to192.168.0.0/24or whatever your home subnet is, and only traffic heading to that network will be routed through the WireGuard server at your house, but all other traffic goes out of your phone’s normal network paths to the internet.Ahh. But what if you already used a VPN on the client for normal browsing etc - can you have two VPNs configured?
No, think of a VPN as a network cable. You can only send out of one or the other.
Now, if you are connected to a device that has another VPN to somewhere you want to go, then technically yes you would be using 2 VPN connections.
Depends on the client configuration. If you route all the traffic through vpn (so, simplified, 0.0.0.0/0) then all their client device network traffic would go through their vpn server at home and is seen as coming from there; otherwise, if you only route specific addressess (like your home network private addressess only) then only those go to their home network and everything else works like it would without a vpn.
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. The open WG port is difficult to detect when the firewall is configured correctly.
If I want to connect to a device using SSH, HTTP, VNC or any other protocol it must first go through my WG tunnel. Running it on an OpenWRT router instead of a server means if the router is working, WG is working. It’s been rock solid. Using Tasker on Android I’ve set it up to automatically connect whenever I leave my house. It 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.
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 rarely if ever see ZeroTier mentioned as a solution, but it’s a self-hostable encrypted virtual mesh network (with a small free tier for corp-hosted), super secure, and really easy to setup. I use ZTnet instead of the free-tier corp-hosted controller
I use a mixture of tailscale and zerotier. Both are pretty powerful.
I used wireguard self hosted for a bit but my work network is pretty locked down and I couldn’t find a UDP port that wasn’t blocked. How are you guys setting up wireguard in your home network? Or is it better to host it on a cloud VM?
I’m using tailscale right now because it punches through every firewall but I don’t like using external providers and I’m worried it will eventually enshittify. I have a cloudflare domain but I can’t really use any UDP port for my VPN as it’s blocked.
I got a VPS because I’m behind CGNAT, and then configured WireGuard on the server and HAProxy to proxy requests to my devices.
It works well for me.
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 !
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 😛
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.
Zero tier. I went tailscale originally, and they’re good, but their mdns support doesn’t exist and several services rely on it. (For me, the showstopper was time machine backups)
I like zerotier over wireguard because it’s one layer lower. So anything that uses Ethernet frames can be routed over it like it was a network switch plugged into your computer. This is probably why mdns works.
Do you test public WiFi with ZeroTier at all?
I ask because there’s a few public networks where WG won’t connect and I’m trying to find ways around it. I could always use cell data but this is more fun to me.
Yeah it’s worked everywhere I’ve tested. But that’s only really been airport WiFi, so I’m not sure it’s indicative of it working in general. It’s easy enough to setup for testing that it’s probably worth a shot
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 :(
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.
1 pangolin 2 whatever is already on your router 3 wireguard
Pangolin also does RP with traefik so it’s a win win
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.
My Asus router has a a few nice ones
