I had a similar scenario.

My solution was to by a new router, flash it with openwrt, then configure ISP in bridge mode and configure proper firewall on openwrt

Wow, thats very, very nice. I didnt know this even existed.

But I suppose if it had widespread support it would be the perfect solution.

Firefox mobile not supporting it might be a dealbreaker though, since it is the browser I use and the one I persuaded all my friends and family to switch to…

But this is an incredibly interesting technology and I will surely look into implementing at least partially if that works.

Thanks a lot for sharing!

I didnt mention on my original post but I do have a virtual machine on gcp, which I use to run mongodb. I didnt mention it because I am not too concerned with it, but mostly it follows the same practices, with the exception being that ssh is open and it has no private data in it.

But I suppose I could do something similiar to what you mentioned. The ideia of having and eating the cake is very nice. And if something goes wrong I could turn of public access and have the vpn still working.

I will consider implementing something like that as well, thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts!

Yes absolutely. For work most of my clients use cloudflare’s different services so I understand they have credibility.

For me though, part of the reason I self host is to get away from some big tech companies’ grasp. But I understand I am a bit extreme at times.

So thanks for opening my mind and pointing me to that very interesting discussion, as well as for sharing your setup, it sure seems to be very sound security wise.

Thats a good point. Maybe I can get away with just temporary file sharing. So when someone wants something I can upload it to the server and send a link. I bet even nextcloud could do that.

Still way less scary then having everything on the server all the time

Id like to know as well. I definetely dont want to be the first person of that story tough

Ive heard of someone who exposed the docker management port on the internet and woke up to malware running on their server. But thats of course not the same as web services.

Oh, now I get what you mean, thanks for the explanation

Yeah it makes sense, I had originally gone with onedrive for the much cheaper price but I will take a look into s3 compatible storage and consider migrating in the future.

Thanks for your reply!

Suggestion 1 definetely does make a lot of sense and I will be doing exactly that asap. Its something I didnt think through before but that would make me much more in peace.

Suggestions 2-4 sound very reasonable, I have indeed searched for a way to self host a waf but didnt find much info. My only only concern with your points is… Cloudflare. From my understanding that would indeed add a lot of security to the whole setup but they would then be able to see everything going through my network, is that right?

Been there, done that lol, my ISP doesnt change my IP half as much as I should like, and I renew my certs half as often as they deserve.

Seriously though, I had certs expire twice until I finally decided to get this setup properly.

I see, I appreciate you sharing your knowledge on the matter.

Yeah I thoght about the spike in size, which I would definetely notice because the amount of data is pretty stable and I have limited cloud storage.

Regarding your last point, I currently have everything under a user account: the data I am backing up, the applications and restic itself all run on the same user account. Would it be a good ideia to run restic as root? Or as a different service account?

Thanks for replying!

I do use dns challanges for renewing my certs. But I use port 443 for application data, not for certs.

Is a vpn always safer then a reverse proxy? Do you use wireguard or do you have any other options worth looking into?

I don’t know much about ransomware but thats what got me concerned. I always assumed if I were to be infected, restic would just create a new snapshot for the files and Id be able to restore after nuking the server.

Thanks a lot for your input. I honestly had not considered this possibility.

Others in the post recommended removing those important files from the public facing server so that in the case of an attack they wouldnt be exposed. So I will try and follow this recommendation asap.

But your answer still applies to everything else I will be hosting so I am concerned. I had no idea ransomware was this smart. I will research more about this topic, but basically if I access a file from two different servers and its fine it means the file is free from infection?

That makes a lot of sense. Thats also very easy to setup so I will do it tonight.

Thanks again for your amazing input!

Thats a good point, I hadnt thought about it before. I like the possibility of sharing these files in my intranet but I suppose you are right. Maybe I could use openwrt to split two networks, one for public stuff only, but my knowledge of networking is quite limited.

That was a great answer, thank you so much!

Yes I didnt even notice the family photos and docs dont need to be on that same server. Initially I just put them there to act as a local file share. But you are absolutely right, moving them from the public server is the best thing I can do to protect them.

I will look into setting up a second server for the private stuff that is not publicluly accessible

Thanks for the amazing reply and specially for the explanation regarding wireguard.

I didnt know about crowsec and kata containers, both amazing projects, I will definetely look into it and try to set them up.

Just one quick follow up question, when you mention dedicanted service user, do you mean its best to have a sepate user for each service, such as one for nginx, one for adguardhome and so on? Currently all of them run under the same user and I didnt think about this possibility before.

Have you played around with Grafana? It really is quite simple if you have prometheus already working.

For a home lab environment you dont even need to use prometheus-alertmanager. Grafana can handle alerts as well.

Grafana also has hundreds of pre-made dashboards you can import. Node monitoring is quite straightforward.

Assuming you have prometheus good to go, all you need to do is go to Grafana - Datasources, create a new datasource, point to your prometheus instance.

Then you can import the dashboards you want.

Now you can setup your alerts - you can use SMTP, telegram, slack among others for your notifications.