this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
84 points (96.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40677 readers
525 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I just setup a minecraft server on an old laptop, but to make it acessible i needed to open up a port. Currently, these are the ufw rules i have. when my friends want to connect, i will have them find their public ip and ill whilelist only them. is this secure enough? thanks

`Status: active

To Action From


22/tcp ALLOW Anywhere Anywhere ALLOW my.pcs.local.ip`

also, minecraft is installed under a separate user, without root privlege

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Why is port 22 open? Is this on your router as well or just the server?

This is SSH, which you should pretty much never have open (to the internet! Local is fine) MC is by default 25565. You will have every bot on the internet probing that port.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Having SSH open to the internet is normal. Don't use password authentication with weak passwords.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Normal for who? I wouldn't expose SSH on 22 to the internet unless you have someone whose full time job is monitoring it for security and keeping it up to date. There are a whole lotta downsides and virtually no upsides given that more secure alternatives have almost zero overhead.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Shodan reports that 35,780,216 hosts have SSH exposed to the internet.

Moving SSH to ports other than 22 is not security. The bots trying port 22 on random addresses with random passwords don't have a chance of getting in unless you're using password authentication with weak passwords or your SSH is very old.

SSH security updates are very infrequent and it takes practically no effort to keep SSH up to date. If you're using a stable distribution, just enable automatic security updates.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Moving to another port isn't a bad idea though. It gives you cleaner logs which is nice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, if something is open by default or very easy to enable without informing about the risks, tons of people will have it exposed without thinking.

It isn't that "tons of people do it so it is normal and perfectly fine" but more "people don't realize." It also uses some nontrivial amount of resources to process and block those attempts, even if they never have a chance of getting in.

There is yet a reason I can find to have it forwarded for home use. Need to ssh into a machine to fix it? VPN.

There are plenty of secure web-based tools to manage your server without a VPN also.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

A large percentage of those hosts with SSH enabled are cloud machines because it's standard for cloud machines to be only accessible by SSH by default. I've never seen a serious security guide that says to set up a VPN and move SSH behind the VPN, although some cloud instances are inherently like this because they're on a virtual private network managed by the hosting provider for other reasons.

SSH is much simpler and more universal than a VPN. You can often use SSH port forwarding to access services without configuring a VPN. Recommending everyone to set up a VPN for everything makes networking and remote access much more complicated for new users.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

OK that is fair, though that is not self hosted...

VPS machines are a completely different beast than self hosting. But I guess I only said home use, not specifically self-hosting though we are in a self-hosted community. There are 1000 guides for setting up a VPN on your home network.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I had it open for a web server for 2.5 years because I was lazy and my IP changed a lot and I traveled and didn't have a VPN setup and never had any issues as far as I could tell. Disabled password and root auth but was also fine with wiping that server if there were issues. It's certainly not recommended but isn't immediately always going to be an issue

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

ssh is one of the most secure servers you can run. The tailscale propaganda is crazy in this community.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Not for people who are asking questions about port forwarding

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

If you have ssh open to the world then it’s better to disable root logins entirely and also disable passwords, relying on ssh keys instead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I dont expose ssh to the internet. I expose wireguard. If you want ssh youll have to break my wiregaurd key and my ssh key.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

For public facing only use key based authentication. Passwords have too much risk associated for public facing ssh

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

yeah no I should have considered that. didn't lick the most secure password. will change when I get home

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Don't use passwords for public SSH in the first place. Disable password authentication and use pubkeys.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

And disable ssh to root. Hell, just disable root login altogether and use sudo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

ssh is local only. so I should change all ports from default then huh

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Your ssh rule says it's from anywhere. You want to change port 22 to 25565, and run /op username on your Minecraft server to whitelist your friends. Make sure your whitelist flag is turned on with your server config.

Instead of allowing traffic over your port from anywhere, you can specify your friend's external IP.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

You can test it out by running 'telnet ' to check if the port is open. This is best done from another network.