listen to my podcast, guys. /s

The entire point of selfhost is to host private services not available to the public. By literal definition, that’s allowing only local traffic to connect to your services. It’s infinitely more secure. A VPN allows you to extend those services over the clearnet to authorized devices via virtualized networks. You don’t have to worry about messing with inbound/outbound ports, or worrying about software failure or misconfigurations accidentally exposing you to the clearnet. You don’t have to worry about DDoS, or abuse. Being attacked? Bring down your VPN and that completely shuts down your issue. Your network is completely unreachable by anyone but a local host.

There’s simply no room for an argument. VPN is objectively better in all possible situations.

I don’t know what kind of firewall you use, but if my firewall is down there is NO traffic at all passing through!

Only a hardware firewall would do this. If it’s software, like implied in your post, no traffic is filtered and all connections are accepted.

VPN is the least amount of work for the most secure setup. There’s nothing to even argue, its superior in every way.

Just like everything else in life, it’s not a binary situation. You can’t say “either it is, or isn’t stealing! Circumstance doesn’t matter!” because circumstance always matter.

If you come at me with the intent to kill me, and I kill you in self defense, that’s not murder. It would be wholly ignorant to say “well you tried to kill the guy who was trying to kill you, so it’s murder! Circumstance doesn’t matter!” That would be the answer of a child.

The argument of Piracy has never been one of “oh, well, it’s not theft.” Of course its theft. You’d have to be in deep denial to make that argument. It’s not your IP. The argument of Piracy is that taking shit from corpos doesn’t fucking matter–no one is getting hurt. As soon as you stop taking from corpos and taking from the little guy, like indie artists, you’re just a fuckin’ thief. And that’s not moral.

There is. It’s called VPN Split Tunneling.

If you want to proxify your connection between you and a service, you enable the split. If you don’t care, or want to not use the VPN, then disable it for that application. So it’s effectively “proxify all connections to this app,” which is the same as your use case.

This is effectively the same damn thing with a single exception. If your VPN is down, there’s no access to your server. If for whatever reason your firewall is down, there’s unrestricted access to your server…

VPN is unquestionably the correct choice 100 times out of 100.

You may say that’s a good practice to separate things

You’re missing the point. VPN isn’t about separating anything… I’m not even sure what you mean by that. VPN is the accepted practice here. Unquestionably. You create private services, and for security you only expose them to the least amount of people possible. You authenticate via VPN connections. You only have to maintain a single database of users to access any number of services, even tens of thousands.

OP is specifically talking about hosting local content that they want to protect. VPN is the solution here.

Your use case, and OPs, are completely different scenarios. I can’t tell if you’re being purposefully disingenuous or just flippantly stupid.

So I actually just joined this community a few days ago to get some ideas. I live in a very old home, about 140-150 years old. It’s been a really great house, but it has its quarks.

I initially came here to get some ideas for home improvements. So I guess I’ll just ask. What are some extremely easy upgrades that you recommend someone with an old house make? They can be a little expensive, it doesn’t matter.

Reread my post. You didn’t do a good enough job the first time.

Reread my post. You didn’t do a good enough job the first time.

Piracy isn’t theft though.

Why would you reply without reading my entire post? Like why? What do you get out of it?

IIRC (could be wrong) the closet was unlocked. So can we really call that “breaking and entering?”

Why not swap from nginx-proxy-manager to Caddy2, which can handle everything? SSL and reverse_proxy?

Yeah, I think he setup his laptop in a private server room to ensure that he had maximum speeds, so they called it criminal trespassing.

Such a fucked up incident.

If somebody needs to have services accessible by someone else besides him, that service can’t be behind a VPN

Again, this is the reason VPNs exist. If that person needs access, then setup Wireguard…

It’s like saying you don’t need a front gate with an access code because then you would have to give out your own access code. But I mean, the lock has the ability to setup more access codes. And you’re saying the only viable option is the leave the gate open and hire a guard to manage access. It’s just… Weird and wrong.

Nice! Glad you got it working. There shouldn’t be any significant performance increase, but there’s at least a tiny one. lmao.

Pretty much anyone outside the US will ignore the DMCA, since it’s solely American law.

This only applies for non-enterprise. There are hundreds of enterprise businesses who also do business in the US which are required to also follow US laws. So you could have a UK, or Sweden based business who has branches in the US, who also have to follow US law.

It’s not quite as cut and dry as you’re making it out to be.

I preach this to people everywhere I go and seldom do they listen. There’s no reason for object storage for a non-enterprise environment. Using it in homelabs is just…mostly insane…

Dockerization isn’t a big deal. You can create a docker server with a smaller SSD/M.2 drive within the same machine to simply run the docker (or portainer) frontend and create pools of like-sized HDDs for pool storage using docker volumes to store your data on your HDD array. The most important thing being that the drives are the same size. So if you start out with 20TB drives, you have to continue with them.

Once you create your pool, you can install more drives as needed and simply increase the size of the pool by the number of drives installed. Add your new drives to your machine, update fstab, add the new drive capacity to your array, and then balance your drives.