I set up an *arr stack and made it work, and now I’m trying to make it safe - the objectivly correct order.
I installed uncomplicated firewall on the system to pretend to protect myself, and opened ports as and when I needed them.
So I’m in mind to fix my firewall rules and my question is this: Given there’s a more sensible ufw rule set what is it, I have looked online I couldn’t find any answers? Either “limit 8080”, “limit 9696”, “limit …” etc. or “open”. Or " allow 192.168.0.0/16" would I have to allow my docker’s subnet as well?
To head off any “why didn’t you <brilliant idea>?” it’s because I’m dumb. Cheers in advance.
What’s your actual end goal? What are you trying to protect against? Do you only want certain systems on your network to be able to access your apps? There’s not really much of a point of a firewall if you’re just going to open up the ports to the whole network.
If you want it to be more secure then I’d close all the ports except for 22 (SSH) and 443 (HTTPS), stick a reverse proxy in front of everything (like Nginx Caddy, Traefik, etc), and use Authentik for authentication, with two-factor authentication enabled. Get a TLS certificate using Let’s Encrypt and a DNS challenge. You have to use a real domain name for your server, but the server does not have to be publicly accessible - Let’s Encrypt works for local servers too.
The LinuxServer project has a Docker image called “SWAG” that has Nginx with a bunch of reverse proxy configs for a bunch of common apps. Might be a decent way to go. The reverse proxy should be on the same Docker network as the other containers, so that it can access them directly even though you won’t be exposing their ports any more.
Authentik will give you access controls (eg to only allow particular users to access particular apps), access logs for whenever someone logs in to an app, and two-factor auth for everything. It uses OIDC/OAuth2 or SAML, or its own reverse proxy for apps that don’t support proper auth.
Just trying to keep outside/malicious actors from entering my stuff while also bring able to use my stuff. More safer is more better, but I’m trying to balance that against my poor technical ability.
My priority list is free>easy>usable>safe. Using UFW seemed to fit, but you’re right, punching holes in it defeats the purpose Which is why I wanted to only allow local network and have only the necessary ports open. You have given me lots of terms to Google as a jumping off point so thank you.
VPN back into your network. Only open the VPN port on your router. Use certificates based VPN.
The guy above you gives great advice. Set up SWAG, then the only ports you’re exposing are 443.
Once you have that set up, look at adding something like authelia. This will give you 2FA on top of those apps meaning even if someone guesses the password and the URL to access them, they still won’t be able to.
I used to use Authelia, but Authentik is nicer since it’s mostly configured through a web UI. It also supports SAML for services that don’t support OpenID Connect. It also has a proxy mode like Authelia, but that’s not recommended if the service has proper SSO support. There’s just a bit of an initial learning curve.
Yeah honestly either solution is a solid one