this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
443 points (98.5% liked)

Selfhosted

41554 readers
710 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
 

Just exposed Immich via a remote and reverse proxy using Caddy and tailscale tunnel. I'm securing Immich using OAuth.

I don't have very nerdy friends so not many people appreciate this.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's not required, but probably OP has a home server with Immich and a VPS which exposes it to the internet. In that setup you need Tailscale for the VPS to access your home server. Sometimes you can't directly expose your home server for different reasons, e.g. ISP doesn't give you an external IP directly (I've had this, where my router would get a 10.x IP so I couldn't port forward because the internet IP was being shared between multiple houses), or the ISP gives you a dynamic IP so there's no guarantee that your IP won't change next time you reset the router, etc.

Also it provides an extra layer of separation, so for example a DDOS would hit the VPS which probably has automatic countermeasures, and even if someone were to gain access to the VPS they still need an extra jump to get to the home server (obviously if they exploit something on immich they would get direct access to the home server).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Gotcha. Thanks for the insight!

It's annoying, as I'd like to expose things for other people in my family (like Overseerr or whatever) without hassling them to also start a VPN or other stumbling block steps.

I was hoping that reverse proxy to overseerrs login screen would be safe enough. 8(

Does docker help limit things at all? I'm running my services through docker, which seems to limit the folders the container can hit. Feels like that would limit the damage someone could do even if they bypassed the login page of Overseerr or whatever app it is?

Edit: thanks for all the replies! Always more to learn and do, haha

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

First of all let me make this absolutely clear, docker is not expected to be secure to that level. While they try to make it hard for someone to escape a container, it's not their main concern so expect that there are vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to escape.

Now the second thing, the Overseer login screen might be secure enough for your case, the problem is that login is hard to do right, and Overseer are doing several other stuff as well, so they might not give it enough emphasis, and even if they do, maybe Immich devs don't, or any one of the dozens of other services, so there are dozen of possible points of failure. Things like Authelia or Google OAuth are focused on authentication, so they do that absolutely right, and then they become the only point of failure for authentication.

To be fair, if you keep things updated it's unlikely not having auth would be a problem. Mostly because most hackers won't even know of your server to begin with. And most systems are secure enough for most casual hacks. But it's an investment worth the time if you plan on making something available to the internet.