Hi,

I an currently trying to add remote access to 2 of my servers but didn’t manage to get a working setup as is.

Right now I want to access 2 servers:

  • one is for media stuff (navidrome, jellyfin, managing the arr stack)
  • one is for my data syncing with rsync and after set a backup from borg to another server not on my domain

I was trying at some point to add stuff such as tailscale, but somehow I always had issues with having both servers reachable within the IP range I use on my local network, so everything would work as is with the current config at home being away. I have also heard of cloudflare tunnels as well, but that I didn’t try yet. At some point I tried to do just a regular wireguard from my opnsense, but I would prefer not to have open ports to worry about (and also had issues with internal IP not being assigned from wireguard as well).

Does anyone here has experience with this? If so, what was your solution and/or caviats to it?

EDIT: I got some very good responses but I think I failed to understand that what I would need is probably a hop in server of sorts for the VPN. Meaning:

  • I login to the hop server
  • I get an internal IP for my network, meaning, 192.168.1.xxx
  • I do whatever I need to do
  • log out

Does anyone has experience with such solution? My point would be able to have full access to everything on the network without having to do a VPN on every machine i need access to (although it can create a massive single point of failure/risk)

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    122·
    11 hours ago

    For remote management, I just enable SSH, configure it to run on some non-standard port and enable Fail2ban… Make sure I use certificates or secure passwords and also check if fail2ban is actually doing its job. Never had any issues with that setup.

    For the services I’ll either use a reverse proxy, plus configure the applications not to allow infinite login attempts, or Wireguard / a VPN.

    • ergonomic_importer@piefed.caEnglish
      5·
      6 hours ago

      For remote management, I just enable SSH, configure it to run on some non-standard port and enable Fail2ban… Make sure I use certificates or secure passwords and also check if fail2ban is actually doing its job. Never had any issues with that setup.

      This is what I’ve done for years, but I sometimes feel like it’s not a great solution from a security standpoint.
      Though I have switched from fail2ban to Crowdsec, which did end up banning my own connection attempts when I forgot to whitelist myself, so that seems secure enough.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        Hmmh. I’m not entirely satisfied with any of them. Crowdsec is a bit too complex and involved for my taste. And oftentimes there’s no good application config floating around on the internet, neither do I get any sane defaults from my Linux distribution. Whereas fail2ban is old and eats up way too much resources for what it’s doing. And all of it is a bit too error-prone(?) As far as I remember I had several instances when I thought I had set it up correctly, but it didn’t match anything. Or it was looking for some logfile per default but my program wrote to the SystemD journal. So nowadays, I’ll double-check everything. I wish programs like sshd and webapps came with that kind of security built in in some foolproof way.