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Considerations for a homeserver thats open to the internet? (Jellyfin / Nextcloud)
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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General advice would be to look boring and hide your IP as much as you are able (get a domain). As long as you're not looking juicy you won't attract skilled attention. It's like locking a bike, most bad actors will just pass by looking around for one without a lock or a real fancy one worth their resources.
You can utilize Cloudflare's free offerings, starting with simple stuff. Their DNS Proxy is essentialy a single-click but will help substantially. You can build on top of that with simple WAF rules, such as droping connection attempts from IPs originating from countries notorious for "poking around". You can also reverse that rule and whitlelist only your country.
Keep your firewall tight, don't expose other ports, put your services behind a reverse proxy and redirect everything to HTTPS. Start simple, constantly improve, learn more advanced methods/concepts.
How is getting a domain protecting you IP? Wouldn't your IP still be accessible even after you link it to a domain?
Yes, but by proxying your traffic via cloudflare your domain will point to their IP instead of yours directly.
My bad, I should have worded that better, thank you for making it clear, that's exactly what I had in mind.
So it makes you IP less discoverable. However, if someone finds your IP randomly (through brute force), would you still be vulnerable? Or is it possible to only port forward to a static CF address so only CF can connect to you outside of your home network?
You would, but that’s where your firewall and SSL certificates come into play. I use a reverse proxy and forward port 80/443 directly to it. Everything I host resolves to a CNAME in Cloudflare and my proxy responds with a 404 to any unknown requests.
You'd set your firewall rules to only accept requests from the cloudflare datacenter IPs for those port forwards. So, the ports would be otherwise blocked to anyone else trying to access them directly.