There’s no reason your media server needs to be directly exposed to the public internet. Use Tailscale. Get everyone that uses it to sign up for a Tailscale account, and add them all to your Tailnet.

Tailscale will perform better than a Cloudflare tunnel because it’s a direct connection between the two peers, whereas Cloudflare tunnels route through Cloudflare.

Tailscale does have relay servers, but they’re only used in very rare cases, if both peers have very strict firewalls. Almost always, the connection between two peers over Tailscale is a direct connection, so there’s no extra latency (other than some small overhead for the encryption)

You could use Wireguard and manually configure it to be in a mesh config, but Tailscale makes it so much easier. I’m a big fan of their product.

Oh yeah, there’ll be some overhead if you’re running Wireguard on a router. Hitting your router’s public IP won’t go out to the internet though - the router will recognize that it’s its IP.

It’s common to run Wireguard on every computer/phone/tablet/etc where possible rather than just on the router, since this takes advantage of its peer-to-peer nature. For home use, that’s how it was originally designed to be used. Tailscale makes it a lot easier to configure it this way though - it’s a bit of work for vanilla Wireguard. Tailscale does support “subnet routers” if you have any devices that you want to access over the VPN that can’t run Tailscale.

My point is that since the VPN uses a different subnet, it’s fine to keep it connected even at home. It’ll only use the VPN if you access the server’s VPN IP, not its regular IP.

In any case, Tailscale and Wireguard are peer-to-peer, so the connection over the VPN is still directly to the server and there’s no real disadvantage of using the VPN IP on your local network.

Headscale is a replacement for the coordination servers, which are only used to distribute configs and help nodes find each other. It won’t change client-side behaviour.

I did this and it still seems to randomly disconnect.

If you have a separate subnet for it, then why do you only want it to be connected when you’re not on home wifi? You can just leave it connected all the time since it won’t interfere with accessing anything outside that subnet.

One of the main benefits of Wireguard (and Tailscale) is that it’s peer-to-peer rather than client-server. You can use the VPN IPs at home too, and it’ll add barely any overhead.

(leaving it connected is assuming you’re not routing all your traffic through one of the peers)

conditional Auto-Connect. If not on home wifi, connect to the tunnel.

You don’t need this with Tailscale since it uses a separate IP range for the tunnel.

Yeah my wife and I are both on Android, and I haven’t been able to figure out why it does that.

The Android client is open-source so maybe someone could figure it out. https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android

Is it just you that uses it, or do friends and family use it too?

The best way to secure it is to use a VPN like Tailscale, which avoids having to expose it to the public internet.

This is what I do for our security cameras. My wife installed Tailscale on her laptop and phone, created an account, and I added her to my Tailnet. I created a home screen icon for the Blue Iris web UI on her phone and mentioned to her, “if the cameras don’t load, open Tailscale and make sure it’s connected”. Works great - she hasn’t complained about anything at all.

If you use Tailscale for everything, there’s no need to have a reverse proxy. If you use Unraid, version 7 added the ability to add individual Docker containers to the Tailnet, so each one can have a separate Tailscale IP and subdomain, and thus all of them can run on port 80.

That’s interesting… It used to be a lot heavier.

Authelia is definitely the lightest in terms of RAM, but it’s also the lightest in terms of features. As far as I can remember, they only added OIDC support fairly recently - previously it only supported proxying.

Nothing’s as bad as trying to host and maintain a Ruby on Rails app :)

Docker has made a lot of it a non-issue though, since the apps are already preconfigured within the Docker image.

That and email protocols are outdated and aren’t too secure. For example:

• Neither SMTP nor IMAP have no way to use two factor authentication.
• Spam blocking is so hard because SMTP was not designed with it in mind.
• SMTP has no way to do end-to-end encryption which is why you need to layer things like GPG on top.

IMAP has a modern replacement in JMAP, but it’s not widespread. SMTP is practically impossible to replace since it’s how email servers communicate with each other.

The “solution” has been for companies to make their own proprietary protocols and apps, for example the Gmail and Outlook apps combined with a Gmail or Microsoft 365 account respectively.

with rootkits

These are eventually going to be blocked on Windows. Microsoft are making changes to what’s allowed to run in the kernel after the Crowdstrike issue last year.

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but Authentik:

• Has a UI for configuring it, including adding users.
• Supports LDAP if you need it. Authelia needs a separate LDAP server.
• Supports practically every two factor auth protocol you’d need: OIDC (OpenID Connect), OAuth2, SCIM, SAML, RADIUS, LDAP, and proxying for apps that don’t support any of them (which is getting rarer).
• Supports permissions and permission groups, i.e. only allow certain users to access particular apps.
• Can be used as the source of truth for Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra. Maybe not as relevant for home use.

I haven’t tried Keycloak but I hear it’s pretty good, albeit a heavier app to deploy.

I have tried Authelia, and it’s much less powerful than Authentik. Authelia requires you to manually modify config files rather than using a web UI. It also only supports OIDC (which is in beta) and proxying. Proxying is not recommended and has several issues since it’s not “true” single sign-on.

I self-host my email using Mailcow, and use a VPS for it. I don’t trust my home server to be reliable enough, and the VPS providers have nicer equipment (modern AMD EPYC CPUs, enterprise SSDs, datacenter-grade 10Gbps or 40Gbps connections, etc). I use a separate VPS just for my emails - it’s the one thing I want to ensure is secure, so I didn’t want any other random software (that could potentially have security issues) running on it…

I also use an outbound SMTP relay to avoid having to deal with IP reputation. SMTP2Go has a free plan for sending <1000 emails per month.

Yeah it’s unfortunate. The nftables syntax is a lot easier though!

The same thing has happened before, around 15 years ago… Before iptables there was a system called ipchains. Migration took a while, but it was eventually done, and nobody talks about ipchains any more.

Docker really doesn’t like firewalls, and doesn’t seem to play nicely with them.

These days it’s a frontend for nftables. iptables is a legacy system that’s eventually going to be removed (just like ipchains before it).

On modern systems, iptables is a wrapper around nftables. So you’re essentially using nftables except without the ability to use any of its more powerful features.

iptables is a legacy system that’s going away. If you don’t learn ufw, you’ll have to learn nftables.

You can’t hard link across drives, so it’s not possible to use hard links if the OP wants torrents and media to be on two separate drives.