Hey all,
Hope this is the right place to be asking (Reddit refugee), but do any of you setup certs for inward facing services? For example, I run “Whoogle” on my proxmox server, which I then access from several other devices when performing searches.
The connection between my machines and that proxmox VM are not encrypted, however only my VLAN (for personal devices) is able to access it.
Is it good practice to create a certificate for those types of servers that can only be accessed within your own network, or overkill?
It is always good practice to set up certificates everywhere. I do it for all of my internal services. Each person has a different level of care for how important privacy and security are and some people have abnormal threat profiles.
With that being said, options are usually to run self signed certificates, roll your own certificate authority for your network, or get valid certificates from a service like letsencrypt.
In home environement, it’s not often that someone will try to snoop on the traffic, however, the risk 0 never exists, personnally, I’ve set up SSL using NGINX Proxy Manager and self-signed certificates signed with my own CA, I use a script to generate new certs if needed, so it’s not too hard to do (It all uses openssl)
The only “issue” would be to put the CA on all your devices if you don’t want the security warning.
Gotcha. NGINX is just for serving externally usually, right? I’ve heard about it, but never used it. Have you heard of certbot before? I may look into it, for practice if nothing else.
No, it can be used internally too, it’s a reverse proxy, I didn’t know anything about this until I tried it! it also allow you to your website without ports behing (for exemple video.lab.home instead of video.lab.home:8096 for jellyfin)
Also, certbots, if i’m not mistaken, is only used for public facing domains, for domains like .local and .home and anything that you use to resolve domains internally will not work.
Except maybe if you use a real domain to point to your internal local IP, which I find too weird but it works ahah
Oooo, I’m going to have to check out NGINX then! I was thinking of adding a custom DNS entry in PiHole so that I could talk to Jellyfin directly with a URL, but I would still need the ports since DNS doesn’t care about/ handle port information. Thank you!
Yes, you’ll learn a lot, like I did few months ago! Have fun :)
Edit: The software is “NGINX Proxy Manager”, to have an All in one solution. if you just use NGINX it might be more complicated!
You’ve got the right idea. You need to have a reverse proxy (like traefik) and a local DNS server (either pihole or something built into a router like unbound which is built into opnsense).
Once you have a sense of how to use the reverse proxy and the DNS server, you can watch this video as a great tutorial.
Basically you need to use a wildcard domain for anything that is not accessible over the internet.
I got this setup and it works very well.
I point my DNS at local IPs then use Let’s Encrypt with DNS validation.
