Selfhosted @lemmy.world SmokingKinoko @lemmy.moe 11 mo. ago

Should i use Cloudflare?

I recently got a Synology NAS and I am trying to setup Emby. I wanna host a media server however, I wanna be able to access the emby location from anywhere and let say my mom access it. Just I wanna keep it secure. Should I use cloudflare?

21 comments

For your own personal items? It's not really worth it IMO. However if you're hosting something for the public, like a Lemmy server, then absolutely yes you should.

For Emby that is breaking their ToS, and you'll have a big corpo watching your traffic all the time. Just buy a cheap 5-10 dollar domain and get HTTPS up and running and you'll be fine.
- I just worried about attacks on my router in case someone gets ahold of the link. Im learning all this security stuff. I actually helped my friend with his lemmy instance and got it running.
  
  I just know next to nothing about security...
  
  Give me something to try and get working I'll pick it up, but I don't even know where to start with this stuff. I read something the other day about using cloudflare to connect to a VPS and then direct that to my nas or something.
  
  I have 2 VPS services and 1 already hosts my jellyfin instance but i was gonna try out emby however, I wanna share my library with family like I share my Jellyfin with them. Just the VPS I run my jellyfin on handles all the security stuff. shrugs
  
  Absolutely a fair reason to be nervous. For this just follow the rules of minimum access. Only open the ports you need to open, and make sure they only point to the item you want to expose. That will take care of 99% of use cases. Most hacks you see happening right now with home labs are because someone did something pretty obvious - like exposing their router/firewall UI to the open internet (instead of it only being accessible to the local network), same with their data servers.
  
  If you have a good network you can even restrict which IPs are allowed to connect through those ports, but remember if your mom's IP changes or you're sitting in a hotel then you're essentially blocking yourself out (without a VPN or something).
  
  Finally, and I would save this for a little later, you can move your Emby/external services to an alternate VLAN. VLANs are virtual-lans, they are a block of IPs that have firewall rules in between each of them. So you could do rules like "Internal clients can talk to Emby, but Emby cannot talk to Internal Clients". This can be a daunting thing and will take a lot of trial and error, not to mention probably revamping your entire network - so I'd hold off for now.
  
  To reduce that, there are a few things you can do.
  
  Option 1:
  
  Only open port 443 and run everything through a reverse proxy like traefik. You can open other ports ad you need them (game server for example)
  
  Run crowdsec to get rid of 95% of bad actors
  
  Whitelist IPs that you know traffic will be coming from and drop everything else
  
  Option 2:
  
  wireguard VPN and just VPN into your home network to access your server
  
  Option 3:
  
  Run tailscale
  
  run fail2ban
- Can this be done with an ISP that gives you a dynamic IP? I have a domain through Google Domains, I just have no idea how to set it up for Jellyfin
  
  Look into dynamic DNS. It's for your exact case, when your up updates you need to update the DNS host with your new IP. Idk if Google domains does it, I use it with namecheap and then there's an option in offense that will tell namecheap that my IP has changed.
  
  This isn't a "production" worthy option because there can be downtime when your Ip switches, but for us it's perfect.
- It's been a while since I've heard anything about this but didn't they change their ToS in regards to media on their network? I thought I read something about that clause getting removed at some point a few months back.
  
  Maybe. Personally it's just another huge corpo that's reading my traffic. There's a dozen other middle men, but no doubt cloudflare wouldn't hesitate to release all of my traffic at a moment's notice.
  
  I believe media hosting is only against their ToS if you try and use the proxy service. In the DNS page you would want to make sure the clouds are not orange. Fair warning though now your IP is exposed to the public.
This might help you understand things a little better. I would advise staying away from Cloudflare if you are self-hosting for privacy.
Quite clearly NO It is a central office that now answers a large part of the DNS questions; apart from the fact that they so often have failures.
Tailscale

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
CF	CloudFlare
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS	HTTP over SSL
IP	Internet Protocol
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPN	Virtual Private Network
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.

[Thread #318 for this sub, first seen 1st Dec 2023, 01:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Skip Emby and look into setting up Jellyfin with Nginx proxy manager. At the end of the day, whatever solution you go with be sure to enable good password security or more advanced security options like 2FA for your exposed Jellyfin service.
I only use cloudflare for Home Assistant and Bitwarden, just not to have many layers where a problem could happen as those 2 services are critical.

I rent a VPS with Authentik and Wireguard for the rest, like Nextcloud, Emby etc. But it's huge hassle with ssl certificates, especially with Let's encrypt ones.

But honestly I've never used it, except the HA and Bitwarden. When I'm on vacation I just want to experience as much as I can from the location I'm at. And I'm trying to stay away from computers when I'm away. And my family really does not care about Emby. So I'll probably stop it.

And BTW you probably shouldn't pass video streams through cloudflare as it's against their TOS. Although I didn't hear about anyone who has been banned.

If you want simple and no hassle solution, just use Tailscale or ZeroTier.
You're asking on Lemmy, so you're going to get a lot of privacy related answers. For usability, Cloudflare tunnels are a super easy and free way to setup and don't involve your family members having to VPN into your network with Tailscale or Wireguard. This is especially useful if they are streaming from a smart TV or media stick.

Is it the most privacy-friendly? No. You're giving up a little bit of that for convenience and lower maintenance. IMO for my threat model, it's worth it.
You can use CF Tunnel so you don't need to expose any ports from your router. They'll also do SSL termination for you as well. You can use their free plan for this AFAIK. You can also run your own SSL proxy as well with HAProxy or Nginx. I'd just use CF, it's easier TBH.
- Be aware hosting media thru their proxy is breaking their ToS. Not saying anything will happen, but be mindful.

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