When I see this sort of thing, and other people are trying to do it, a reverse proxy or vpn is always mentioned. Heres my question:
How Dangerous is it to just open the port for it on my router and access it like that?
Lets say i want to access jellyfin from Kodi on my xbox or something outside my network, the vpn solution wouldnt work for this i would think.
My issue with reverse proxies, and why im asking, is it seems less secure? I mean Im well aware that an IP is easy to get, i guess. But how likely is someone to look for something on my network specifically? With reverse proxies it seems like i would be broadcasting my server to the internet in a way its easier to happen across, than someone being interested in a random residential IP.
I run a minecraft server for friends on my main computer anyway, and i know tons of people do that, theoretically thats the same level of danger as opening my network for jellyfin specifically.
VPN isnt an option because of this xbox stuff i mentioned and people in my family who have 0 chance of understanding it regardless.
So what is the better option, going through this reverse proxy ( which im actually also unsure would work with kodi) or rawdog the server on my network. I guess leaving the server exposed? or every device even.
Not only is it likely, it’s pretty much guaranteed that a bot will scrap your network if it’s opened to the public.
Strong suggestion for Tailscale here. It is incredibly easy to use and very easy to set up with multiple users. Opening ports directly to the internet is a thing of the past for me now, ever since I started.
I opted for ZeroTier - this way I can connect many devices outside home network to any device inside …
So I have jellyfin deployed to my kubernetes home lab, router port forwarded to the ingress controller (essentially a reverse proxy) on the cluster. So exposed to the internet. Everything on it has authentication, either built in to the application or using an oauth proxy. All applications also have valid SSL configurations thanks to the reverse proxy. I also use cloudflare DNS with their proxy enabled to access it and have firewall rules to drop traffic that hits port 80/443 that doesn’t originate from those cloudflare proxy ips (required some scripting to automate). It drops a lot of traffic every day. I have other secuirty measures in place as well, but those are the big ones.
So yeah, if you expose your router to the internet, its gonna get pinged a lot by bots and someone might try to get in. Using a VPN is a very simple way to do this securely without exposing yourself and I’d suggest going that route unless you know what you’re doing.
Ah shieet. I just have jellyfin running with a port open on my router and everyone on here is saying that’s a bad idea and now I’m wanting to redo my whole jellyfin setup
Just put jellyfin and tailscale on an old windows computer and it’s setup in less than 10 minutes.
+1 on tailscale. I used to push it through cloudflare but with tailscale has been much simpler and doesn’t run afoul of cloudflare’s TOS
Tailscale is a vpn no? Dont think i would be able to connect to it from an xbox or, my family who is even less technologically inclined than I am would be able to figure it out on other devices.
I believe it can be done on xbox possibly through nodes but it is very easy for family to setup on their devices!
Someone may have commented this already but my recommendation is to set up an overlay network like tailscale or twingate.
Doesn’t require you to open any ports on your firewall, and Tailscale at least is very performant since it uses Wireguard as it’s underlying protocol. (I have yet to test Twingate but I’ve heard positive things.)
It will require a little more setup per device but it’s honestly incredibly simple and more than secure enough for a home network.
Tailscale also has something called a subnet router which you can use to get incompatible devices onto the tailnet.
Just set up a Wireguard server, for example on Oracle’s Always Free tier, and have every server and client join the VPN and then let Jellyfin and whatever only listen on the VPN interface. No need to open your router and you get strongly encrypted traffic.
I went about this in a pretty noob way. Synology + Jellyfin and I followed some online guides. Synology gives you a free DDNS hostname so you can access your NAS away from home. I don’t have to VPN or anything. I have to warn that using this method will result in having slow transfer speeds if you’re uploading large files. I use it to stream movies and shows so it seems to be fine for this purpose.
I use a reverse proxy so I can just use a hostname and not need a port. I run Jellyfin that way no problem, function-wise.
Additionally, not having a domain won’t necessarily protect you since you do have people out there scanning for ports and when they see 8096, they’re going to immediately know it’s a Jellyfin/Emby server and any vulnerabilities associated with those. If you use a reverse proxy, they only see 443 which is…pretty much every other site on the internet. That’s security through obscurity, I know, but it will help mitigate some of the easier attacks.
I’ll say that everything I have to have a port open for (mostly game servers) gets targeted by the internet at large despite the fact that I’ve published the address and port absolutely nowhere online and only shared it with close friends. I almost never get anyone trying to log in to my other services.
Okay, so can people just find that shit on google? And also what are the odds of certain companies and agencies being perturbed by me essentially broadcasting copyrighted content? Even if i own it. I shpuldnt expect FBI or worse, Viacom hitmen right? Especially of the content is behond a log in?
Not even Google, they just go through every ip and port number and record if something responds
Not only are people doing regular scans, there are companies with dedicated infrastructure to do the scans for them, and making result easily searchable.
Check out https://www.shodan.io . Put your (or any other) IP address in the search bar and I guarantee the most of the services running there are already scraped, indexed and categorized. Sometimes it will even recognize a specific app or framework it’s build upon.
Not only you can search for a specific IPs, but can easily look for, let’s say all jellyfin instances in a certain country.
I used to search for open tvheadend instances to watch certain TV channels for free. There was a guy who not only published his tvheadend on the internet, but there was an active VNC server on his mediacenter, running kodi. Controllable by anyone without a password.
