I’m in the process of setting up homelab stuff and i’ve been doing some reading. It seems the consensus is to put everything behind a reverse proxy and use a vpn or cloudflare tunnel.

I plan to use a VPN for accessing my internal network from outside and to protect less battle tested foss software. But I feel like if I cant open a port to the internet to host a webserver then the internet is no longer a free place and we’re cooked.

So my question is, Can I expose webserver, SSH, WireGuard to the internet with reasonable safety? What precautions and common mistakes do I need to watchout for.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    0·
    19 hours ago

    I used to do this myself, just with OpenVPN instead of Wire guard, worked fine, then I found overlay networks like Tailscale and it changed my life.

    Just use an overlay network. Tailscale or Netbird are my personal recommendations, Netbird if you want 100% open source right out of the box, Tailscale if you don’t mind their default coordination server being closed source, (you can run the open source Headscale server if you want)

    Overlay networks make all this sooooo much easier. Encrypted secure access to any and all of your internal network devices, with fine tuned access control depending on how you want it set up.

    I will never portforward or manually set up a VPN tunnel again, overlay networks perfectly fit my use case and they are so much easier to get working.