I should also add something that lots of beginners miss.

The reverse proxy does not care what the domains that you define in it actually resolve to. It receives the domain name as a HTTP header which is completely at the whim of the client. As long as that domain name matches one of the domains defined in the proxy, it's all good.

You can successfully connect to a proxy with a domain name defined in the domain owner's DNS, or you can make up your own DNS that says whatever you want, or you can define any domain->IP association you want in your hosts file, or you can simply use curl or wget to connect directly to the proxy IP and lie about the domain in the HTTP headers without having it resolve in any DNS.

This means that yes, the proxy will happily serve your "private" *.local.example.com services to someone connecting from outside your LAN. All they have to do is figure out (or guess) your subdomain names. You need to add IP restrictions in the proxy (default deny from all + lan ip mask explicit exception) if you really want those services to be restricted to the LAN.

DNS is not security, it's a public service that maps domains to IPs.

TLS is only security in the sense it protects the connection en route from eavesdropping, but it doesn't restrict access.

Maybe look into https://nginxproxymanager.com/ it makes it quite easy to set up.

If you are new i recommend "Caddy V2"

It is by far the easiest.

Wait with Nginx until you're better. (and even then, use linuxserverio/swag instead of nginx)

I know this isn't what you asked but I would move any hosted services outside of DNS to a separate device.

There are pros and cons to keeping the proxy on the VPS or at home.

If you keep it at home you will have end-to-end encryption from the browser to your home server. Downside, you will not get the IP of the remote client, just the IP of the router, so you won't be able to do IP blocking or diagnostics.

By putting the proxy on the VPS and decrypting HTTPS there you can add remote IPs to connections but you have to keep the TLS certificate on the VPS so in theory someone could mess with it.

A third option is to run a minimal passthrough proxy on the VPS that adds the remote IP to the HTTPS connections without decrypting them. To do this you must use the same proxy at both ends (home and VPS) and both must have the PROXY protocol enabled.

I would suggest doing just proxy at home to start with because it's simpler. If you want a GUI use NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) it's super easy. If you prefer a proxy where you write config by hand use Caddy.

After you have it working at home you can consider adding the one on VPS and enabling the PROXY protocol. Although I'm not 100% sure Caddy supports it, look into it. You may have to use Nginx in both places I'd it doesn't.

You do not need to add subdomains in DNS, not unless you want to. You just need one domain to point an A/AAAA record at the VPS public IP, then you can make the subdomains a wildcard CNAME pointing at the base domain. So A/AAAA example.com -> IP, and CNAME *.example.com -> example.com. Or you can put the A in another domain and point the CNAME at that.

When requesting TLS certificates it's the same thing, you never ask for explicit certificates for each subdomain, you just ask for one wildcard certificate for *.example.com. Aside from the obvious benefit of not having to add and remove certificates every time you add or remove subdomains, there's the not obvious benefit of not having bots learn about your subdomains (certificate application are public records).

The subdomains do not need to resolve in DNS for this to work, the certbot verifies that you own the domain by using a DNS API key to create a temporary TXT on example.com; as long as that works it won't care what's actually defined in there.

How can something like Tailscale be blocked?

Check "boring proxy" On github easy to install and configure and does https for you

Either you run the RP in the VPS and point to the ips on your server or you run it on the server and access it like you are accessing Jellyfin.

Easiest option is a container with Nginx proxy manager (imo) with NPM you can get free let's encrypt certs, but be aware, in case you want automated certificates, NPM will need to run on the machine pointed to by the DNS (in your case, your VPS I guess)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

[Thread #738 for this sub, first seen 5th May 2024, 12:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Usually a reverse proxy runs behind the firewall/router. The idea you are pointing 80/443 at the proxy with port forwarding once traffic hits your router.

So if someone goes to service.domain.com

You would have dynamic DNS telling domain.com the router is the IP.

You would tell domain.com that service.domain.com exists as a cname or a record. You could also say *.domain.com is a cname. That would point any hosttname to your router.

From here in the proxy you would say service.domain.com points to your services IP and port. Usually that is would be on the lan but in your case it would be through a tunnel.

It is possible and probably more resource efficient to just put the proxy on the VPS and point your public domain traffic directly at the VPS IP.

So you could say on the domain service.domain.com points to the VPS IP as an a record. Service2.domain.com points to the VPS IP as another a record.

You would allow 80/443 on the VPS and create entries for the services

Those would look like the service.domain.com pointing to localhost:port

In your particular case I would just run the proxy on the public VPS the services are already on.

Don't forget you can enable https certificates when you have them running. You can secure the management interface on its own service3.domain.com with the proxy if you need to.

And op consider some blocklists for your vps firewall like spamhaus. It wouldn't hurt to setup fail2ban either.

It depends where you want the complexity.

Since ssh is a layer4 tunnel if you don't run a proxy on your home box, you'll need a new network connection for each service, if you are fine with that, I would set it up only on the VPS. This means if the tunnel goes down, you should at least get 502 error rather than a timeout or connection refused.

Alternatively you could forward 80, 443 to a proxy service on the home server. That would require two ports for the ssh.

You can drop it to a single ssh connection by having a proxy on both and just have the VPS proxy Http and https to the same port on the home server.

Firstly...why are you routing your home stuff through a VPS? I'm confused on what is happening here.

If you just want to access your things remotely, setup a VPN server on the router, and connect to it that way. You also dont need a reverse proxy or SSL if you're already accessing things over a secured connection. Where did you get this info from?