What’s your go too (secure) method for casting over the internet with a Jellyfin server.
I’m wondering what to use and I’m pretty beginner at this
I just expose my local machine to the internet, unsecured
Thanks stranger over the internet seems like the best option.
Nginx in front of it, open ports for https (and ssh), nothing more. Let’s encrypt certificate and you’re good to go.
I would not publicly expose ssh. Your home IP will get scanned all the time and external machines will try to connect to your ssh port.
They can try all they like, man. They’re not gonna guess a username, key and password.
Doesn’t take that to leverage an unknown vulnerability in ssh like:
That’s why it’s common best practice to never expose ssh to raw internet if you can help it; but yes it’s not the most risky thing ever either.
If you’re going to open something, SSH is far, far more battle-tested than much other software, even popular software. Pragmatically, If someone is sitting on a 0-day for SSH, do you genuinely think they’re gonna waste that on you and me? Either they’re gonna sell it to cash out as fast as possible, or they’ll sit on it while plotting an attack against someone who has real money. It is an unhealthy level of paranoia to suggest that SSH is not secure, or that it’s less secure than the hundreds of other solutions to this problem.
Here is my IP address, make me eat my words.
2a05:f6c7:8321::164 | 89.160.150.164I linked a relevant vulnerability, but even ignoring that, pragmatically, you feel they’d be targeting specific targets instead of just what they currently do? (That, by the way, is automating the compromise of vulnerable clients in mass scale to power botnets). Any service you open on your device to the internet is inherently risky. Ssh best practices are, and have been since the early days, not to expose it to the internet directly.
You did link a vulnerability! That is true. I didn’t claim SSH had a clean track record, I claimed it had a better track record than most other software. That vulnerability is hard to exploit, and generates a lot of noise if you were to try, which nobody has because it’s never been found in the wild.
People who sit on 0-days for critical software like SSH don’t go out and try to mass-exploit it because it will be found within the day and patched within the week once they start making noise. This is not a quiet exploit. If they’re smart, they sell it. If they’re ambitious, they build an elaborate multi-chain attack against a specific target. Only 0.14% of devices vulnerable to this exploit are EoL versions of OpenSSH, so once this was patched, it was no longer a useful attack vector.
It would also have been completely negated by fail2ban, which is prominently deployed on internet facing SSH, as it required thousands and thousands of connection attempts to trigger the condition. It could also have been mitigated by not running sshd as root, though I understand that most people don’t want to deal with that headache even though it is possible.
There are thousands of independent honeypots that sit quietly and sniff all the mass-attacks and they earn their daily bread by aggregating and reporting this data. If you run a mass exploit, you will be found within the day. Trust me, I burned an IP address by regularly scanning the whole IPv4 space. You are going to end up on blacklists real fuckin’ fast and whatever you were doing will be noticed and reported.
If you’re going to open something, SSH is a very safe choice. But yes, don’t open it if you don’t need it. We are discussing how to open a service to the internet safely, though, so we need it.
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
Are we living in the same universe? In mine software doesn’t get patched all the time, in fact it’s usually a lack of patches that lead to any significant system compromise… Which happens time and time again. Also you’re on a thread that is advising hobbiests on how to configure and maintain their personal server, not the engineering meeting for a fortune 500. Yes, you can make ssh very secure. Yes, it’s very secure even by default. In the same regard, new vulnerabilities/exploits will be found, and it remains best practice not to expose ssh to raw internet unless absolutely necessary and with the considerations required to mitigate risk. Ssh isn’t even implemented identically on every device, so you literally cannot talk about it like you are. Idk why you’re arguing against the industry standard for best practices decided by people who have far more experience and engineering time than you or I.
You got balls to post you public addresses like that… I mean I agree with you wholeheartedly and I also have SSH port forwarded on my firewall, but posting your public IP is next-level confidence.
Respect.
Well, having a domain is basically documenting your IP publicly. It’s not that risky.
Are you giving random strangers legal permission to pentest you? That’s bold.
fail2ban with endlessh and abuseipdb as actions
Anything that’s not specifically my username or git gets instantly blocked. Same with correct users but trying to use passwords or failing authentication in any way.
I see everyone in this thread recommending a VPN or reverse proxy for accessing Jellyfin from outside the LAN. While I generally agree, I don’t see a realistic risk in exposing Jellyfin directly to the internet.
It supports HTTPS and certificates nowadays, so there’s no need for outside SSL termination anymore.(See Edit 2)In my setup, which I’ve been running for some time, I’ve port-forwarded only Jellyfin’s HTTPS port to eliminate the possibility of someone ending up on pure HTTP and sending credentials unencrypted. I’ve also changed the Jellyfin’s default port to a non-standard one to avoid basic port-scanning bots spamming login attempts. I fully understand that this falls into the security through obscurity category, but no harm in it either.
Anyone wanna yell at me for being an idiot and doing everything wrong? I’m genuinely curious, as the sentiment online seems to be that at least a reverse proxy is almost mandatory for this kind of setup, and I’m not entirely sure why.
Edit: Thank you everyone for your responses. While I don’t agree with everything, the new insight is appreciated.
Edit 2: I’ve been informed that infact the support for HTTPS will be removed in a future version. From v10.11 release notes:
Deprecation Notice: Jellyfin’s internal handling of TLS/SSL certificates and configuration in the web server will be removed in a future version. No changes to the current system have been made in 10.11, however future versions will remove the current system and instead will provide advanced instructions to configure the Kestrel webserver directly for this relatively niche usecase. We strongly advise anyone using the current TLS options to use a Reverse Proxy for TLS termination instead if at all possible, as this provides a number of benefits
Anyone wanna yell at me for being an idiot and doing everything wrong?
Not yell, but: Jellyfin is dropping HTTPS support with a future update so you might want to read up on reverse proxies before then.
Additionally, you might want to check if Shodan has your Jellyfin instance listed: https://www.shodan.io/
I rent a cheap $5/mo VPS and use it to run a wireguard server with wgeasy and nginx proxy manager. Everything else runs on my home server connected by wireguard.
