Hi all, I’m running a small website off of a raspberry pi in my house. I have opened ports 80 and 443 and connected my IP to a domain. I’m pretty confident in my security for my raspberry pi (no password ssh, fail2ban, nginx. Shoutout networkchuck.). However, I am wondering if by exposing my ports to the raspberry pi, I am also exposing those same ports to other devices in my home network, for example, my PC. I’m just a bit unsure if port forwarding to an internal IP would also expose other internal IP’s or if it only goes to the pi. If you are able to answer or have any other comments about my setup, I would appreciate your comment. Thanks!
I did this for some time. But now I don’t want any ports open at home.
That’s why I have a rented VPS that runs Traefik (a reverse proxy). This VPS has a VPN connection to my home net and is behind Cloudflare DNS. This is how I can safely expose services (even in my home net) to the Internet without forwarding any ports.
Of course those services need to have some kind of authentication.
Damn thats top security right there.
I’ve been considering doing the same thing, but i’m not sure there’s much actual benefit over feeling like there’s more separation, because if someone accesses the vps, they get direct access into your server at home. What’s your opinion?
Yeah, same. I have a small server that runs Wireguard and I only expose services on any device on the local Wireguard interface. That way I can safely access stuff in my home net from anywhere.
If you’ve set up a VPN to your home net then why not run that VPN from the devices you use to access the reverse proxy? With wireguard at least this is quite easy.
That way you don’t have to expose anything you just run a VPN with the reverse proxy in it.
My setup is
Internet <—> Reverse Proxy (on VPS) <—> OpenVPN Server (on VPS) <—> VPN Client (home router) <—> local stuff…
I don’t understand what you mean? Generally I don’t like to require a VPN to access stuff. My use case is, when I’m away I’d like to be able to access things from e.g. a public device, a friends laptop, etc. That’s why I’m not using a VPN to access things.
The VPN site-to-site connection is also responsible to make network shares available on my Nextcloud instance and other services.
Currently I’m rethinking the VPN, but I don’t think I can ditch it in favor if e.g. Cloudflare Access tunnels (too unflexible, limited compatibility, or too much hassle to keep everything configured correctly).
Also, I don’t use VPN to authorize requests. I use Authelia to authorize useres with Free-IPA as directory in the backend.
I know, this might be overkill for my “simple” use cases, but I like to play around with these kind of enterprise-adjacent solutions.