I need help figuring out where I am going wrong or being an idiot, if people could point out where…
I have a server running Debian 12 and various docker images (Jellyfin, Home Assistant, etc…) controlled by portainer.
A consumer router assigns static Ip addresses by MAC address. The router lets me define the IP address of a primary/secondary DNS. The router registers itself with DynDNS.
I want to make this remotely accessible.
From what I have read I need to setup a reverse proxy, I have tried to follow various guides to give my server a cert for the reverse proxy but it always fails.
I figure the server needs the dyndns address to point at it but I the scripts pick up the internal IP.
How are people solving this?
I do it the simple way. I just stick nginx in front of everything. If I don’t want it to be publicly accessible I stick nginx basic auth in front of it.
The advantages is that I can easily access the services from anywhere on any device with just the password. I only need to trust nginx’s basic auth to keep me protected, not various different service’s authentication.
The downside is that some services don’t work great when you have basic auth in the front. This is often due to things like public links or APIs that need to be accessed with other auth.
I just use nginx because I’ve always used it. I’ve heard that there are newer reverse proxies that are a bit easier to configure.
How safe/secure is that approach
It depends on how much you trust nginx. A HTTP server is probably a bit more complex that your average VPN solution so probably more likely to have vulnerabilities, but it is also the most popular web server on the planet, so if there is a zero day I’m probably not the first target. If you stay up to date you are probably fine.
I do that, but only allow access to private services from local IP addresses, rather than putting auth in front of them. Then I use IPsec to access my local-only things.
