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Options for protecting home IP on my self hosted home srver (startrek.website)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosting@slrpnk.net
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I've been running a home server at home running CasaOS for a few months now. I use a wireguard vpn to remote in to use Jellyfin on my phone etc. Basically i want to know if there's a way i can both hide my public IP (such as using a conventional vpn for torrenting) while still being able to remote in to my server?

I've been thinking of running running all my network traffic through my server and setting up some sort of firewall too, but I'm fairly new to this as this was originally just a project I did out of spite after getting rid of Spotify. I'm fairly green when it comes to networking and servers, but I'm otherwise pretty good with computers and can muddle my way through most things.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

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[–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Yeah, sounds about right. Server is on my home network and I've forwarded the applicable wireguard ports on my router so I can remote in. I just want to make sure that if I'm running a torrent client on my server or on my phone while I'm connected remotely then I won't be getting angry letters from my ISP.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Ah, gotcha.

    So... You generally have to pay a VPN company to get access to their VPN exit nodes, and "hide" in among all the other traffic.
    There is nothing you can self-host to do that.

    ProtonVPN used to be a popular recommendation, however they are slipping out of favour due to behaviour over the last couple of years.
    If you are looking for a VPN for anonymity, be careful of "review" articles posted on blogs owned by dodgy VPN providers.
    I'm not sure who the "go to" VPN provider is these days.

    If you rent a VPS (virtual private server) in order to run your own VPN exit node, and the VPS provider gets a letter regarding illegal activity, then your VPS will be deleted.
    I don't know of a VPS provider that will protect customers privacy WRT legal requests (maybe there are, but they will be exceptionally expensive).

    So everyone pays a VPN provider that doesn't keep logs in order to hide amongst the herd.

    In order to make sure that your file downloading system uses a VPN instead of the default gateway for internet access is a huge field.
    So you need to describe exactly the software you want to use the VPN exit node, and how it's installed.
    Because the solution could be host firewall, docker networking, isolated networks.... Pretty sure there are many others.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    So, I already pay for Proton VPN, mostly for the E-Mail, but I do use the vpn currently on my main PC to torrent, which I then manually transfer to my server over the network, but I would like to eliminate the middleman and torrent directly to the server, while still being able to easily remote in. I run CasaOS on my Homelab and I was planning on installing qbittorrent in a container, probably through Portainer. I'm already running Soulseek on the server the same way (originally I was running slskd, but it was overly complicated to set up and once it was set up and working there were lots of upload errors and I didn't like the UI, so I changed to a Nicontine+ docker), but that's just open to the web.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Imo, only services that require a VPN exit node should use a VPN exit node.

    https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun
    Is a well known VPN container that people use, and works with ProtonVPN.

    I don't know anything about how to do this, but a cursory search for "gluetun qbitorrent docker" suggests that gluetun gets network: "host". Any container that has to use a VPN exit node gets network_mode: "service:gluetun". A depends_on: {gluetun details} style option will ensure that any service that should use a VPN exit node will not run unless gluetun is running.

    Then it's getting the data out of the qbittorent container into whatever you are using as a media server.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Thanks I'll look into this tonight. I'm still trying to wrap my head around dockers and containers etc. I think I've a pretty good handle on it now, but it still hurts my brain after a while.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    In that case, maybe look into proxmox and VMs.
    Then run docker inside a VM. Have multiple VMs of docker for different environments (eg a VM for containers that should only use a VPN, another for media server stuff, another for experimenting... Whatever)

    Learning proxmox (or another hypervisor) is well worthwhile, because the base installer sets things up to just work for virtualization. And VMs are great for learning to run services.
    Then you can spin up VMs for isolating environments, and have the benefit of oversight and management tools as well as snapshots. Snapshots means you can take a snapshot, tinker and break things, then roll back to a known good snapshot and try again.

    I use proxmox on any bare metal before I start setting up VMs for services. Even if it's just a single VM with the majority of resources allocated to it.

    Is proxmox overkill for running a server for some docker containers? Yes.
    Does it make things easier? IMO, yes. At least operationally safer/easier.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I went through the same thought process as you a while ago, also with CasaOS. I ended up using the *arr suite, Jellyseer and then this container via Portainer https://haugene.github.io/docker-transmission-openvpn/. All the instructions are on there for whichever provider you go with, and all it took was making sure the env variables and permissions were in the right place.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago

    Thanks for the recommendation. Once I found the "n" I mistyped as "m" in one of the file directories it actually went quite well. I looked at setting up sonarr & radarr, but its really just me and my partner using it right now, so I'll put that on the back burner until I get more storage.

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