What service would you recommenced for firewall. The firewall I use on my laptop is ufw, should I use that on the vps or is their a different service that works better?
Comment on Hosting multiple services with one IP address.
deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 4 days ago
The job of a reverse proxy like nginx is exactly this. Take traffic coming from one source (usually port 443 HTTPS) and forward it somewhere else based on things like the (sub)domain. A HTTPS reverse proxy often also forwards the traffic as HTTP on the local machine, so the software running the service doesn’t have to worry about ssl.
Be sure to get yourself a firewall on that machine. VPSes are usually directly connected to the internet without NAT in between. If you don’t have a firewall, all internal services will be accessible, stuff like databases or the internal ports of the services you host.
a_person@piefed.social 4 days ago
kumi@feddit.online 4 days ago
Firewalld.
sudo apt-get install firewalld systemctl enable --now firewalld # ssh on port 22 opened but otherwise most things blocked by default firewall-cmd --get-active-zones firewall-cmd --info-zone=public firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=1234/tcp firewall-cmd --runtime-to-permanentThere are some decent guides online. Also take a look in
/etc/firewalld/firewalld.confand see if you want to change anything.You need to know about zones, ports, and interfaces for the basics. Services are optional. Policies are more advanced.
deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 4 days ago
UFW works well, and is easy to configure. UFW is a great option if you don’t need the flexibility (and insane complexity) that manually managing iptables rules offers,
kumi@feddit.online 4 days ago
The main problem with UFW, besides being based on legacy iptables (instead of the modern nftables which is easier to learn and manage), is the config format. Keeping track of your changes over track is hard, and even with tools like ansible it easily becomes a mess where things can fall out of sync with what you expect.
I strongly recommend firewalld, or rawdogging nftables.
K3can@lemmy.radio 3 days ago
ufw is just a fancy frontend for iptables, but hasn’t been updated for nftables, yet.
Firewalld is an option that supports both, and if you happen to be running cockpit as well, the cockpit-firewall plugin provides a simple GUI for the whole thing.
kossa@feddit.org 4 days ago
What? Only when they are configured to listen on outside interfaces. Which, granted, they often are in default configuration, but when OP uses Docker on that host, chances are kinda slim that they run some rando unconfigured database directly. Which still would be password or authentication protected in default config.
I mean, it is never wrong slapping a firewall onto something, I guess. But OTOH those “all services will be exposed and evil haxxors will take you over” is also a disservice.
deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 4 days ago
I’ve seen many default docker-compose configurations provided by server software that expose the ports of stuff like databases by default (which exposes it on all host interfaces). Even outside docker, a lot of software, has a default configuration of “listen on all interfaces”.
I’m also not saying “evil haxxors will take you over”. It’s not the end of the world to have a service requiring authentication exposed to the internet, but it’s much better to only expose what should be public.
kossa@feddit.org 4 days ago
Yep, fair. Those docker-composes which just forward the ports to the host on all interfaces should burn. At least they should make them 127.0.0.1 forwards, I agree.
kumi@feddit.online 3 days ago
I’m guilty of a few of these and sorry not sorry but this is not changing.
Often these are written with local dev and testing in mind, and in any case the expectation is that self-hosters will look through them and probably customize them - and in any case be responsble for their own firewalls and proxies - before deploying them to a public-facing server.
Never just run compose files on a machine directly exposed to the internet.