Heya, I just wanted to post here before doing something that puts my stuff out on the internet for anyone to see ๐
So I have a basic, still in-configuration homelab network going on. It's Modem --> OPNsense router --> Ubiquiti switch --> Openwrt AP. DNS and DHCP (via Dnsmasq) are working right now, each VLAN (Home Devices, IoT, and Guest) can access the internet. But I'm still tinkering and doing firewall stuff, so sometimes I reactivate the ISP router and switch back to that until I have everything perfect enough to not bother my family
I have a Proxmox homelab that I've been running services like Jellyfin and Immich in a Docker Debian VM for a few months now, but I was getting tired of typing out IPs and remembering port nums, especially after bouncing between my router and the original ISP router whenever I'm having network issues. So I wanted to finally map those IPs to human-friendly domains. So like, 192.168.10.247:8096 --> jellyfin.example.com, 192.168.10.247:2283 --> immich.example.com, etc.
I quickly learned that DNS services like Unbound and Dnsmasq do what they say on the tin, DNS only, so I can't do a override to map ports to a domain, as they can only do IPs. My research led me to reverse proxies, and people said Caddy was simple on OPNsense, so I installed that and followed the official guide/documentation. But then I ran into the issue of needing the domain to be externally resolveable. Which then led me to realizing I need to use some sort of CA.
I know Let's Encrypt does it for free, plus the guide mentions them as a default so why not? Except I still need an actual external domain so... Cloudflare? DuckDNS? Someone else? I'm so lost...
The biggest concern of mine right now is, if I set up a reverse proxy, does that mean my services are externally accessible? I was using Tailscale so I could avoid that, especially since I know services like Jellyfin have had serious vulnerabilities, and everyone says it's a good rule of thumb to just not expose services. But how do I map ip + port #s to a domain on OPNsense?
No need to have an external domain. And you can set up an internal DNS to route any domain name to any IP address. Just be sure not to point anything to your external IP address from your ISP or any globally addressable IPv6 addresses.
Issue is that it might confuse your devices that jump between internal access and external access like your phone if you use a domain name that's owned by someone else, like example.com. I have two domains, one for my VPSs and one for internal stuff. So when my devices are outside the network they can't resolve any of the DNS addresses that are set up inside and can't access any of the IP addresses. That is unless I connect with vpn. I also have pangolin for a few things that are accessible externally, but that's rare since apps can't use those kinds of authentication systems, just web front ends.