As I start to host more and more services on my home server, my family and friends are interested in using some of the services I host as well. Up to now, all of my services have been internal-only, and my wife and I just use Tailscale to access everything. Getting others set up with tailscale isn’t an issue, but I can only have up to 4 other users before I have to pay to add more, and I have more than 4 people I would like to have access to some of the things I host.
Right now I’m using cloudflare tunnels to make some services available externally. I’m behind CGNAT, so I’m forced to use something like tunnels or similar. I’ve always read that if you are going to open things up externally to use a reverse proxy (which I use internally), but does this still apply with cloudflare tunnels? What else should I be looking at to make sure I have everything secured properly?
A reverse proxy is just for convenice of stuff like hostnames and ssl termination. It’s not a security layer.
The proper way to do it would be to have your public stuff in a DMZ , if untrusted users (i.e. could have malware on their device) are going to access it.
Personally I use Netbird and host a tiny server in the cloud, which a local node connects to, to avoid NAT or firewall rules. Since it’s self-hosted, there is no user limit.