Hey all,
I’m setting up a homeserver and trying to figure out the best way to access it remotely. I’ve been looking at different solutions, but I’m a little stuck.
I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP when I’m also trying to use a commercial VPN for privacy / to combat services fingerprinting me based on my IP.
I’m currently considering a reverse proxy setup with an authentication provider like authentik or authelia, but as far as I understand, that wouldn’t work well with accessing services through an app on my mobile device (like for jellyfin music for example.) I did think about just opening up the ports and using a DDNS with a reverse proxy, but is’nt that like a big security risk?
Keep in mind I am no network admin, but I don’t have anything against learning if someone can point me in the right direction.
Also I heard some people say that on proxmox you should use unprivileged containers instead of vms for your services, does that hold up?
Any recommendations for tools or approaches?
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Tailscale, if you don’t want to make your services available to anyone else than you (and people you want to grant access to).
This is the best option if you don’t want to manage your own VPN server.
I second this.
NGINX Proxy Manager and DuckDNS.
Get DuckDNS set up first.
Then go to DuckDNS.org and register a domain.
Then go into NGINX proxy manager.
It’s pretty straightforward, click “add proxy host”, then type the domain from duckdns (I like to do a different subdomain for each service, ie: calibre.mydomain.duckdns.org, homeassistant.mydomain.duckdns.org, etc.) and point it at your container with the service you want to access remotely.
You’ll want to enable let’s encrypt. But other than that the defaults should be fine.
I’ve been using this setup for years, then one day just installed caddyserver. No certbot, no boilerplate nginx config etc.
I was still using nginx for internal services but then replaced it with “fabio lb” because it works well with consul.
I was so happy do discover it that I want to share it with everyone ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Thank you for your attention on this matter.
Don’t do this just use tailscale, it’s 100% easier and very fool proof
What’s wrong with this approach?
I feel that beginners should avoid reverse proxying until they’ve learned more about networking security. Judging by OPs post and consideration of blindly opening ports to wan they seem to have a low level of knowledge about this stuff so a mesh vpn is much safer for them and their network
CGNAT sends its regards.
(Although if you have IPv6 access you might get around this… But even in 2026 you will face issues going only this way).
I am behind GCNAT, and my ISP doesn’t do IPv6. I have a free tier VPS from Oracle that uses wireguard to tunnel packets to my home server.
Ah, if only Oracle could take at least one of my multiple credit/debit cards.
Personally, I use headscale (self-hosted tailscale) that is open to the internet. Then my phone and all other devices use tailscale clients to connect to that. All my other services are accessed through the tailscale magic DNS service.
Nothing except headscale is open to the internet, and I can access anything I need on the server and other devices. It also doesn’t just route All traffic through my server, only the stuff to other tailscale nodes.
Then just recently I’ve been using Nginx proxy manager and my DNS to make nicer names instead of memorizing a dozen ports for random services I host :p
I’ve been frp to create a reverse proxy between my NAS at home and a DigitalOcean droplet. Been using it for over a year now, and not had any issues.
Depends I just have a proxy and open port 443. Its not wide open but open enough that others can use it. I geo block have IP lists filter through it and suricata. Or use a VPN if others don’t need access.
Its not wide open but open enough that others can use it
How does that work? Are you saying you are filtering with Suricata? Curious as in my mind a port is either on or off. I am always ready to be schooled.
a firewall can be used to filter incoming traffic by its properties. most consumer home routers don’t expose the firewall settings
I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP
You don’t have to route all traffic through the VPN. Only traffic for your home network.
I am using wireguard for this purpose. My router supports that. It’s a very easy setup and works fine in every is case I encountered except for android car. You do not expose anything to the outside. It’s kind of like logging in to your home network.
I heard you need to exclude Android auto in the WireGuard settings, then it should work.
The reason is that the car communicates via IP with your phone. But when all phone traffic is routed through your home, it can not reach the car.
Oh thanks. I knew the reason for the issue but had not thought of looking for a solution. Well I thought there was none.
Thanks for asking! I have the same problem, so eager to read the comments. Could you share what you choose in the end and why?
If you’re running insecure services, you can restrict them to be accessible by vpn. I have a mix of internet accessible and vpn accessible services using the tailscale nginx plugin.
If you want to send all your traffic over a vpn, you will either need to route all your traffic through your own vpn or use some sort of multiplexed vpn. tailscale can do this with mullvad, but it’s not yet possible with headscale.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web NAS Network-Attached Storage nginx Popular HTTP server
[Thread #110 for this comm, first seen 22nd Feb 2026, 16:31] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Your mileage may vary, as it’s a project that doesn’t look to be actively worked on anymore, but selfhosted-gateway is a simple wireguard docker setup that’s relatively easy to set up. It spins up the relevant proxies and tunnel, Doesn’t cost anything, nor is there any signups etc… all you need is a VPS, a domain name and a home machine.
I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP when I’m also trying to use a commercial VPN for privacy / to combat services fingerprinting me based on my IP.
My ASUS WRT router (running Merlin Firmware) forwards my Home WireGuard VPN server through one of my Proton VPN clients, I get all the added bonuses of being connected to my home network while benefiting from appearing across the world.
I’m currently considering a reverse proxy setup with an authentication provider like authentik or authelia, but as far as I understand, that wouldn’t work well with accessing services through an app on my mobile device (like for jellyfin music for example.)
This is correct, you cannot host an authentication service in front of Jellyfin’s proxy otherwise the Jellyfin Media Playwr will not connect to your server however, there is a Jellyfin SSO plugin for authentication which is what I use and I disabled the manual login form via CSS but be warned if you take this route that the CSS can be re-enabled on the login screen using your browsers element inspect, I wish you can disable it outright but it’s heavily baked into Jellyfin from what I’ve read.
I suggest setting up a IP-Blacklist and only whitelisting the known IP’s.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but removing the login form via CSS is just a cosmetic effect and it doesn’t have any effect on your security, since bots will try to brute force the login directly using the login endpoint.
Oh I am fully aware it just cosmetic, that’s why I added this line In my original comment:
but be warned if you take this route that the CSS can be re-enabled on the login screen using your browsers element inspect
hence why I also suggest just outright blacklisting all IP’s and only whitelisting the known few at the reverse proxy level.
My recommendation is a VPN server to connect in from outside and have the default gateway for the VPN clients be a server that acts as a router that’s set up with your commercial VPN.
That way, you can be outside on a phone or a computer, access your internal network and still have your public internet traffic go out through your commercial VPN without having to be able to configure multiple VPN connections at once (eg. Android doesn’t support that).
Eg. 2 debian proxmox containers. One that runs wireguard (head/tailscale might also work here?) for external access and one that runs mullvad(or whoever) VPN cli and IP forwarding to be the gateway for your clients.
Only downside is the extra hops to send everything through your home network first rather than straight to the commercial vpn which is probably fine depending on your speeds. You can always disconnect and connect directly to the commercial VPN for faster internet traffic if you need to.
This is what i did but on the router. I have openwrt on the router. You can install an extension called PBR (policy based routing) on it.
Then you set up one wireguard interface that’s in the same firewall zone as your LAN to your lan and another that’s in the WAN. You can create policies to route any outbound connections (including the ones from your mobile client devices) through the commercial WAN wireguard connection.
In addition for family members access i set up a pangolin instance (kind of like tailscale but selfhosted) on a Hezner VPS and a very simple oauth provider (pocket id) for authentication. Ive got a bunch of users and nobody had any problems with the signup process after i sent them the invite link.
That way i can always be directly in my lan but other users can access without accessing my lan at all.
My Ubiquity Dream Machine has Wireguard integrated. So it’s literally just a few clicks to spin up a server. I use it in combination with a port forward on my FritzBox and a dyn ip using https://dynv6.com/ and a domain i had laying around anyways.
Regarding Wireguard: Wireguards (imho) best feature is split tunneling. You can decide which ips or subnets to route through the tunnel. See
AllowedIPs.As a default it says something like
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0Which means “just route everything through me”.
However you could allow your subnets only. Like this I use my private and my business vpn at the same time.
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.0/24,10.0.1.0/24,10.0.2.0/24,10.0.3.0/24You mentioned, that you have not a lot experience with networking, so your subnet may look like that. Just check your local ip and replace the last digit with
0/24AllowedIPs = 192.168.2.0/24For the unprivileged container thing, containers tend to be lighter on resources than VMs at the cost of a little isolation (they share the same kernel as proxmox which could have security implications).
The ability for lxc containers to run unprivileged with all the restrictions that entails alleviates a bit of that security risk.
Both options are generally considered pretty secure but bugs/vulnerabilities could break isolation in either case. The only real 100% safe isolation is bare metal.
I tend to run containers unless I have a really good reason to need a VM, and run unprivileged unless I have a really really good reason not to.
