Hey all,
I’m setting up a homeserver and trying to figure out the best way to access it remotely. I’ve been looking at different solutions, but I’m a little stuck.
I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP when I’m also trying to use a commercial VPN for privacy / to combat services fingerprinting me based on my IP.
I’m currently considering a reverse proxy setup with an authentication provider like authentik or authelia, but as far as I understand, that wouldn’t work well with accessing services through an app on my mobile device (like for jellyfin music for example.) I did think about just opening up the ports and using a DDNS with a reverse proxy, but is’nt that like a big security risk?
Keep in mind I am no network admin, but I don’t have anything against learning if someone can point me in the right direction.
Also I heard some people say that on proxmox you should use unprivileged containers instead of vms for your services, does that hold up?
Any recommendations for tools or approaches?
My recommendation is a VPN server to connect in from outside and have the default gateway for the VPN clients be a server that acts as a router that’s set up with your commercial VPN.
That way, you can be outside on a phone or a computer, access your internal network and still have your public internet traffic go out through your commercial VPN without having to be able to configure multiple VPN connections at once (eg. Android doesn’t support that).
Eg. 2 debian proxmox containers. One that runs wireguard (head/tailscale might also work here?) for external access and one that runs mullvad(or whoever) VPN cli and IP forwarding to be the gateway for your clients.
Only downside is the extra hops to send everything through your home network first rather than straight to the commercial vpn which is probably fine depending on your speeds. You can always disconnect and connect directly to the commercial VPN for faster internet traffic if you need to.
This is what i did but on the router. I have openwrt on the router. You can install an extension called PBR (policy based routing) on it.
Then you set up one wireguard interface that’s in the same firewall zone as your LAN to your lan and another that’s in the WAN. You can create policies to route any outbound connections (including the ones from your mobile client devices) through the commercial WAN wireguard connection.
In addition for family members access i set up a pangolin instance (kind of like tailscale but selfhosted) on a Hezner VPS and a very simple oauth provider (pocket id) for authentication. Ive got a bunch of users and nobody had any problems with the signup process after i sent them the invite link.
That way i can always be directly in my lan but other users can access without accessing my lan at all.