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?
You must log in or # to comment.
Tailscale, if you don’t want to make your services available to anyone else than you (and people you want to grant access to).
This is the best option if you don’t want to manage your own VPN server.
Tailscale’s free offering goes a long way.
Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN, which I would still like to use. The way I understand it, if I routed my entire network through tailscale to my server, it would essentially make all my internet traffic exit at my server. So, everything would still appear to be coming from my home IP address. I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.
Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN
You can split your devices traffic, Tailscale traffic through Tailscale, everything else through your masking VPN.
I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.
For that, what I would do is put the masking VPN (like PIA or whatever) on your router (not all routers can do this) and then have Tailscale on the devices or individual services. In theory, everything would still be able to talk to each other (even if your mobile device is not behind the router), but everything that is behind the router would enter and exit their traffic wherever you have the masking VPN set to. Downside of doing this is that EVERYTHING that is behind that router is also behind that VPN which can cause problems with some services, like banking and streaming.
It would also mean that the only way you could host a public service is to have an external VPS acting as a reverse proxy. Cloudflare might also have something that could work around this setup, but I’m not familiar with their offerings.
This setup also doesn’t mask your traffic (origin and destination) from your mobile provider (just your home ISP), but that is a harder nut to crack as they can see, real time, where you are physically, and depending on your device, may have deeper device access anyways. I’m thinking prepaid phones and phones bought from the carrier (at least here in the US) or if your carrier has “asked” you to install an app to manage your account. My assumption is that my mobile provider can see anything I do while I have my phone or tablet with me, and just work around that.
You might want to ask in !privacy@lemmy.ml and !privacy@lemmy.world, as this is more up their alley.
Wouldn’t a MullvadVPN exit node from Tailscale suit your need perfectly? I’m a noob though.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation PIA Private Internet Access brand of VPN PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSO Single Sign-On VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
[Thread #110 for this comm, first seen 22nd Feb 2026, 16:31] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I am using wireguard for this purpose. My router supports that. It’s a very easy setup and works fine in every is case I encountered except for android car. You do not expose anything to the outside. It’s kind of like logging in to your home network.
NGINX Proxy Manager and DuckDNS.
Get DuckDNS set up first.
Then go to DuckDNS.org and register a domain.
Then go into NGINX proxy manager.
It’s pretty straightforward, click “add proxy host”, then type the domain from duckdns (I like to do a different subdomain for each service, ie: calibre.mydomain.duckdns.org, homeassistant.mydomain.duckdns.org, etc.) and point it at your container with the service you want to access remotely.
You’ll want to enable let’s encrypt. But other than that the defaults should be fine.
I’ve been using this setup for years, then one day just installed caddyserver. No certbot, no boilerplate nginx config etc.
I was still using nginx for internal services but then replaced it with “fabio lb” because it works well with consul.
I was so happy do discover it that I want to share it with everyone ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Thank you for your attention on this matter.
CGNAT sends its regards.
(Although if you have IPv6 access you might get around this… But even in 2026 you will face issues going only this way).
I am behind GCNAT, and my ISP doesn’t do IPv6. I have a free tier VPS from Oracle that uses wireguard to tunnel packets to my home server.
Ah, if only Oracle could take at least one of my multiple credit/debit cards.
That’s a bummer. It’s great for this stuff, don’t need processing power or memory, and I don’t really care if it got nuked for some reason
Personally, I use headscale (self-hosted tailscale) that is open to the internet. Then my phone and all other devices use tailscale clients to connect to that. All my other services are accessed through the tailscale magic DNS service.
Nothing except headscale is open to the internet, and I can access anything I need on the server and other devices. It also doesn’t just route All traffic through my server, only the stuff to other tailscale nodes.
Then just recently I’ve been using Nginx proxy manager and my DNS to make nicer names instead of memorizing a dozen ports for random services I host :p
My Ubiquity Dream Machine has Wireguard integrated. So it’s literally just a few clicks to spin up a server. I use it in combination with a port forward on my FritzBox and a dyn ip using https://dynv6.com/ and a domain i had laying around anyways.
Regarding Wireguard: Wireguards (imho) best feature is split tunneling. You can decide which ips or subnets to route through the tunnel. See
AllowedIPs.As a default it says something like
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0Which means “just route everything through me”.
However you could allow your subnets only. Like this I use my private and my business vpn at the same time.
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.0/24,10.0.1.0/24,10.0.2.0/24,10.0.3.0/24You mentioned, that you have not a lot experience with networking, so your subnet may look like that. Just check your local ip and replace the last digit with
0/24AllowedIPs = 192.168.2.0/24Cloudflare Tunnels work great and are really easy to setup. Plus you are not exposing you machine completely to the outside, as the cloudflared service/container „calls out“, and Cloudflare is your reverse proxy. Downside is, you’re binding yourself to one of the US hyperscalers.
Pangolin uses the same principle, but is a bit more challenging to setup. Plus you need some kind of cloud server to make it work.
As you already have a VPN active at all times (at least it sounds like that), a VPN home seems out of the picture.
Unless you have a dedicated firewall at home, maybe reconsider the reverse proxy route. Personally would not feel comfortable with exposing a machine at home to the internet in full without a handle on what it can do or how it may be reached.
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.
I’ll recommend netbird as its entirely running on your server, is free, and I found it way easier to set up compared to Tailscale/Headscale
So is this like a Tailscale alternative and not a way to expose your services?
Correct. Its just a mesh VPN
Depends I just have a proxy and open port 443. Its not wide open but open enough that others can use it. I geo block have IP lists filter through it and suricata. Or use a VPN if others don’t need access.
Its not wide open but open enough that others can use it
How does that work? Are you saying you are filtering with Suricata? Curious as in my mind a port is either on or off. I am always ready to be schooled.
a firewall can be used to filter incoming traffic by its properties. most consumer home routers don’t expose the firewall settings
I went a different path than the VPN route that seems popular in the other comments…
I use a reverse proxy (caddy) with wildcard SSL (so all my hostnames aren’t in the public cert registry) plus port knocking. So normally no outside IPs are allowed to access my internal services, but I can knock and then access anything for a while. Working well so far.
How’d you setup the port knocking? Is that something caddy does?
I’m using haproxy and was thinking of trying the same thing… not sure if haproxy supports it though, or whether I have to do something else …?
I do the port knocking at the firewall level (it’s a pretty simple nft chain setup). Caddy isn’t involved at all. I was thinking about integrating that into my caddy config using something akin to an operator, but I haven’t needed any extra functionality yet.
