So I’m relatively new to server hosting. (But experienced with remote web hosting from providers.) After about a year of fighting to run Nextcloud on a hosting company and finally losing everything from the cPanel vulnerability a few months ago, I broke down and launched my own home server. I’m looking for advice to maximize security.
CachyOS Linux with ClamAV Docker via Portainer Nextcloud (E2EE), Immich, DocuSeal and NoteTrace Routed through a domain and subdimains via Zero Trust Cloudflare Tunnel and Cloudflare DNS.
I have regular redundant backups both onsite and offsite with Duplicati.
My passwords for OS and all admin dashboards are extremely long, unique, random strings managed by Bitwarden.
I know just enough about this stuff to get into trouble. What else should I setup? I have little to no monitoring going on and don’t know much about that direction.
What I did was setting up two routers. The outer one is a big filter, and the only packets coming in went through it.
If someone would have managed to take over this outer router, the next step would have been to probe the inner router. For this, they would send packets originating at the outer router to anything on the inside net.
This would trigger an alert on the inner router that switches a relay, cutting the power on the outer router.
Why should they take over the outer router if they can just take over the destination they were routed to?
That is a separate issue. Hardening a single service that happens to offer a login is easier than hardening a whole bunch of services that were never intended to face the net.
No I mean why would the attacker even attempt to attack your outside if they can just figure out what sits behind it, follow it through the NAT and then exploit it from there.
I know that risk, but that has been mitigated by other means. There is no open port exposed to the net waiting to be hacked. It only opens on demand for a single connection.
May I ask with what you initiate the connection?
Are you using some kind of STUN server/service?