If its only you and you want best security, setup a VPN system. (Tailscale, Netbird, or others are quite easy)
If someone else should also, and you dont want everyone to have to use a VPN, then you can expose some services directly. Of course behind CGNat you need some third-party system to allow this (e.g. cloudflare or a rented server).

I am not a big fan of cloudflare, they are a huge centralized company, easily allowing tracking across websites with clear-text access and kinda discouraging learning how to secure things yourself (which you have to do anyways, because you are a service provider and only cloudflare is not enough if its still publicly accessible though them)
But in the end its your choice. They easily allow you as service provider to protect yourself from DDoS attacks or allowing IPv4 access when you are behind CGNat, things you just cannot easily do yourself, certainly not without costs.

Why so complicated? Why not just SSH? Put it on some random port, make it public key login only, and you’re done.

It largely depends on what you mean by ‘anywhere’, in particular if you only want to access it from your own devices or also other people’s you can only access for a minute or two and where you can’t install anything.

Of course there is also the question which services you want to access, e.g. just Websites and -Applications over HTTPS or do you also want e.g. the pi-hole’s DNS service to be available.

Maybe something like tailscale.

I would go with wireguard VPN or something like cloudflare tunnels or tailscale. With wireguard you’ll need to open up an external port and forward to your VPN host, but wireguard uses UDP so no one can probe it for responses. CF tunnels and tailscale you don’t have to open up holes in your firewall which is nice.

You also have the option of using a proxy and opening up 443 publicly on your firewall, but unless you know what you’re doing I’d leave that closed until you learn more.

My router supported OpenVPN out of the box so I just use that and have remote connections disabled in all of my software

I’m curious what the other, more advanced users here have to tell me about it because I’m still new to the self hosted stuff and that was the first thing I thought of to do

Yes, you can use a Cloudflare tunnel but why? Since you’re into self-hosting why should you depend on some random company to tunnel your traffic when you most likely don’t need it? You also have all the potential tracking, spyware, risks and “being hostage” scenarios that may come with that choice.

The following assumes your use case is a simple home server for “standard arr apps, jellyfin, pi-hole” for personal usage that sits inside your network and your objetive is to be able to access those services. If you’re instead trying to host a game server / few services for friends (that doesn’t really need to be “inside” your home network) there’s a more complete comment with other security considerations and recommendations here.

Your basic requirements are:

• Some kind of domain / subdomain payed or free;
• Preferably Home ISP that has provides public IP addresses - no CGNAT BS;
• Ideally a static IP at home, but you can do just fine with a dynamic DNS service such as https://freedns.afraid.org/.

Quick setup guide and checklist:

1. Create your subdomain for the dynamic DNS service https://freedns.afraid.org/ and install the daemon on the server - will update your domain with your dynamic IP when it changes;
2. List what ports you need to access remote;
3. Setup Wireguard VPN on the server. There’s also this nice UI that can be used to do most of the setup and create client config files;
4. For the VPN use custom ports with 5 digits - something like 23901 (up to 65535) to make your service harder to find;
5. Configure your ISP router to assign a static local IP to the server and port forward the VPN port to the server IP;
6. Only expose absolutely required services (the VPN port in this case) to the Internet. Any service the server provides, SSH, configuration interfaces and whatnot can accessed through the WireGuard VPN;
7. In the server consider setting up nftables / iptables / another firewall 10 minute guide;
8. Configure nftables to only allow traffic coming from public IP addresses (IPs outside your home network IP / VPN range) to the Wireguard port - this will protect your server if by some mistake the router starts forwarding more traffic from the internet to the server than it should;
9. Configure nftables to restrict what countries are allowed to access your server. Most likely you only need to allow incoming connection from your country (https://wiki.nftables.org/wiki-nftables/index.php/GeoIP_matching).

Since you’re only allowing access to your services through the VPN and you’ve heavily restricted access to the VPN port you’ll be safe. Just a side note, don’t be afraid to expose the Wireguard port because if someone tried to connect and they don’t authenticate with the right key the server will silently drop the packets.

Now if your ISP doesn’t provide you with a public IP / port forwarding abilities you may want to read this in order to find why you should avoid Cloudflare and how to setup and alternative / more private solution.

I want to have the same setup as you! Do you have any guides on how you did it?

I use Tailscale with their DDNS feature that generates you a domain that resolves each of your Tailnet devices when connected. You can even run a command that generates an SSL cert for your given node and you can use that to further secure it with TLS in case you don’t want to deal with untrusted cert warnings.

This is especially useful for iPhones because they won’t keep your Tailscale VPN always on, but you can configure it so that requests to specific domains will activate and use your Tailscale VPN, which you just set to that generated one.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #319 for this sub, first seen 1st Dec 2023, 09:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Cloudflare is just so nice. Handles ssl for all your sites automatically.

My advice: only forward ports 8080 and 443, then make sure that you have fail2ban or crossed properly set up on your reverse proxy. After that, you are pretty much fine as long as you keep on top of updating your containers.

I would be careful about which apps you proxy. Idk why you need to access the admin portal for pi hole worldwide. If you really want to do that, you should set up a vpn.

First off, don’t expose anything that doesn’t need exposed. If your the only one using it you could use a VPN or ssh.

Second off, make sure you isolate everything with firewalls. Your reverse proxy should only have access to each service and each service should only have access to the reverse proxy. You should also block non essential ports.

For the services themselves, make sure you use strong passwords and keep them updated. For docker you can use watchtower to automatically pull and deploy software.

I’d say to start with CF tunnels unless you need non-web based applications. Cloudflare tunnels require you to have a domain, though.

It has the added benefit that you have network monitoring, logging and some filtering for security that they do on top and you get to manage everything from their web interface.

be warned that the first time can be a bit confusing, but since it’s done using their web interface it’s easier than if you have a problem making wireguard work.

1. Create a tunnel with a public hostname that will be the url to access that service. During the creation of the hostname specify you want it protected by L7 application firewall.
2. Create a new self-hosted application in cloudflare application section and for starters use the default login email and in rules specify the list of emails that are allowed to login

you should now be able to access your application from anywhere.

Alternatively, if you have a DNS server in your home network you can add a private IP range to your tunnel. Let’s say 192.168.0.0/24. Then when you connect with their pseudo-VPN (cloudflare warp or cloudflare ONE) you can directly use your home network’s ip address from that device. If you tell your device to use a local DNS server that resolves your internal services, you’ll be able to connect to them that way.

Make your services password protected and have some software like fail2ban that blocks people from brute-forcing passwords.

Keep your software up to date.