Any guides on how to host at home? I’m always afraid that opening ports in my home router means taking the heavy risk of being hacked. Does using something like CloudFlare help? I am a complete beginner.
Edit: Thanks for all the great response! They are very helpful.
Cloudflare yes. Even if you aren’t using tunnels it will help obfuscate your real ip. If you are hosting personal services you can also block access from countries you don’t expect to access them from.
Also it seems most bots scanning domains are checking www and the base domain url. I recommend pointing those at a vps or something like GitHub or substack if you don’t need it for something else.
Use a reverse proxy that 404s anything besides the subdomains you are actually using. Always use wildcard certs to avoid exposing subdomains and obfuscate your subdomains for common services to make them hard to guess.
Isolate your servers from the rest of your network with vlans if possible.
You will never be fully immune so all you can do is add more layers and roadblocks.
From what I understand, opening a port isn’t a risk in and of itself — it’s only a risk if the software using the port is insecure! So long as you use reliable software and take care to configure things properly (following through with instructions from a site like ArchWiki or the official documentation helps), you’re good.
CloudFlare is more for DDOS protection, which you almost certainly don’t need . You could always set up DDOS protection later on, if the need ever arises.
I think the safest option is to not host from your home network. If you aren’t up to date on security patches, you could potentially expose a lot of data from an insecure server running inside your network.
There are precautions you can take, like isolating any external facing servers from the rest of your network, for example, but I generally recommend using a hosted service instead.
There are ways to host things from home without opening ports in your router at all, this usually involves running something that calls/tunnels out of your network and back to some service and accepts incoming connections and sends them “baskward” over that connection. Cloudflare offers something called Tunnel, ngrok does something similar (though mainly aimed at development and not production hosting), and you can even host something yourself using something like frp (which is what I use, even for the Lemmy instance I am writing this from).
I haven’t looked too closely at it, but there is an awesome-tunneling page someone put together that goes over these options and more.
Let me know if you want a bit more details on these options or specifics of how I’ve set up frp.
Not OP and I don’t have any specific questions right now, but if you got any general advice on frp you want to share, I’d be happy to read it :-)
Very basically, I set up a
frpson the public server, and onefrpcper service I want to have publicly accessible - where thefrpc.inidefines all the specifics, so I don’t have to touch the server regularly. Is that correct so far?Edit: After typing it out, I came up with a question - what happens when the
frpcs go offline? Will the server return an error, fallback, or just deny the connection?Yeah, you’re basically on the right track. I do a couple things in a possibly interesting way that you may find useful:
- I run multiple
frpss on different servers. Haven’t gotten around to setting up a LB in front or automatically removing them from DNS, but doing that sort of thing is the eventual plan. This means running as manyfrpcs as I havefrpss. I also haven’t gotten to the point of figuring out what to do if e.g. one service exposed viafrpsis healthy but another is not. It may make sense to run HAProxy in front of it or something… sounds terrible… - I have multiple
frpc.inis, they define all of the connection details for a particularfrpsthen useincludes = /conf.d/*.inito load up whatever services thatfrpcexposes. - I run
frpcin docker and use volumes to manage e.g. putting the rightfrpc.iniand/conf.d/<service>.inifiles in there. - I use QUIC for the communication layer between
frpcandfrpsusing certificates for client authentication. - I run my
frpcs (one container perfrps, I’m considering ways to combine them to make it less annoying to deploy) right alongside the service I am exposing remotely, so I run e.g. one for Traefik, one forgogsgiteaforgejo ssh, etc. If you are using docker-compose I would put one (set of)frpcin that compose file to expose whatever services it has. Similar thought for k8s, I would do sidecar containers as part of your podspec. - If I have more than one instance of a service, such as e.g. running multiple Traefik “ingress” stacks, I run a set of
frpcs per deployment of that service. - Where possible I use proxy protocol via
proxy_protocol_version = v2to easily preserve incoming IP address. Traefik supports this natively, which is the most important service to me as most of what I run connects over HTTP(s). - I choose to terminate end-user SSL using Traefik within my homelab, so the full TLS session gets sent as a plain TCP stream. There is support for HTTPS within frp using
plugin = https2http, but I like my setup better.
As to your question of “what happens when the
frpcs go offline?”, it depends on service type. I only use services oftype = tcpandtype = udp, so can’t speak to anything beyond that with experience.In the case of
type = tcpyourfrpsyou can run multiplefrpcs and thefrpswill load-balance to them, meaning if you run multiple you should get some level of HA because if one connection breaks it should just use the other, killing any still-open connections to the failedfrpc. Same thought there as how e.g.cloudflaredusing their Tunnels feature makes two connections to two of their datacenters. If there is nothing to handle a particular TCP service on anfrpsI think the connection gets refused, it may even stop listening on the port, but I’m not sure of that.Sadly in the case of
type = udpthefrpswill only accept onefrpcconnection. I still run multiplefrpcs, but those particular connections just fail and keep retrying until the “active”frpcfor that udp service dies. I believe this means that if there is nothing to handle a particular UDP service on anfrpsit just drops the packets since there isn’t really a “connection” to kill/refuse/reset, the same thing about stopping listening may apply here as well but I am also unsure in this case.My wishlist for frp is, in no particular order:
frpcmaking multiple connections to a serverfrpcbeing able to connect to multiple servers- Some sort of native ALPN handling in
frps, and ability to use a custom ALPN protocol for frp traffic (so I can run client traffic and frp traffic on the same port) frpssupport for loadbalancing to multiple UDP via some sort of session tracking, triple-based routing, or something elsefrpssupport for clustering or something, so even if onefrpsdidn’t have a way to route a service it could talk to anotherfrpsnearby that did- or even support for tiering the idea of “locality”, first it tries on the local machine, then it tries in the same zone/region/etc
- It’d be super neat if there were a way to do something like Cloudflare’s “Keyless SSL”
Overall I am pretty happy with frp, but it seems like it is trying to solve too much (e.g “secret” services, p2p, HTTP, TCP multiplexing). I would love to see something more focused purely TCP/UDP (and maybe TLS/QUIC) edge-ingress emerge and solve a narrower problem space even better. Maybe there is some sort of complex network-level solution with a VPN and routing daemons (BGP?) and firewall/NAT stuff that could do this better, but I really just want a tiny executable and/or container I can run on both ends and have things “just work”.
<pipedream> I want the technology to build something similar to Cloudflare incredibly simply, and for more providers to be able to offer something similar. Maybe there is something that could be built to solve this if they open source Oxy. </pipedream>
- I run multiple
