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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Is it considered bad practice to expose selfhosted services on public internet? (self.selfhosted)

submitted 1 year ago by OmltCat to c/selfhosted

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I see a lot of people here uses some form of remote access tool (VPN/Tailscale) to access their home network when not at home. I can’t really do this because my phone (iOS) can only activate one VPN profile at a time, and I often need this for other stuff.

So I chose to expose most web based services on the public internet, behind Authelia. But I don’t know how safe this is.

What I’m really unsure are things like Vaultwarden: while the web interface is protected by Authelia (even use 2FA), its API address needs to be bypassed for direct access, otherwise the mobile APP won’t work. It feels like this is negative everything I’ve done so far.

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[–] RunningInRVA 15 points 1 year ago

I use a reverse proxy and client certificate authentication for anything I expose. That requires me to pre install the client certificate on all of my devices first, but afterwards they can connect freely via a web browser with no further prompting to authenticate. Anybody without the client certificate gets a 403 before they even get past the proxy.

There are limitations to this and overhead of managing a CA and the client certificates for your devices.