Buying a domain. There might be some free services that, similar to DuckDNS in the beginning, work reliably for now. But IMHO they are not worth the potential headaches.

DuckDNS pretty often has problems and fails to propagate properly. It’s not very good, especially with frequent IP changes.

I’d appreciate it very much!

Great suggestion to secure the backups themselfes, but I’m more concerned about the impact an attacker on my network might have on the external network and vice versa.

That’d be the gold standard. Unfortunately, the external network utilizes infrastructure that doesn’t support specifying firewall rules on the existing separate VLAN, so all rules would have to be applied on the Pi itself or on yet another device between, which is something I’d like to avoid. Great general advice, though!

While this is a great approach for any business hosting mission critical or user facing ressources, it is WAY overkill for a basic selfhosted setup involving family and friends.

For this to make sense, you need to have access to 3 different physical locations with their own ISPs or rent 3 different VPS.

Assuming one would use only 1 data drive + an equal parity drive, now we’re talking about 6 drives with the total usable capacity of one. If one decides to use fewer drives and link your nodes to one or two data drives (remotely), I/O and latency becomes an issue and you effectively introduced more points of failure than before.

Not even talking about the massive increase in initial and running costs as well as administrive headaches, this isn’t worth it for basically anyone.

I’ve been tempted by Tailscale a few times before, but I don’t want to depend on their proprietary clients and control server. The latter could be solved by selfhosting Headscale, but at this point I figure that going for a basic Wireguard setup is probably easier to maintain.

I’d like to have a look at your rules setup, I’m especially curious if/how you approached the event of the commercial VPN Wireguard tunnel(s) on your exit node(s) going down, which depending on the setup may send requests meant to go through the commercial VPN through your VPS exit node.

Personally, I ended up with two Wireguard containers in the target LAN, a wireguard-server and a **wireguard-client **container.

They both share a docker network with a specific subnet {DOCKER_SUBNET} and wireguard-client has a static IP {WG_CLIENT_IP} in that subnet.

The wireguard-client has a slightly altered standard config to establish a tunnel to an external endpoint, a commercial VPN in this case:

[Interface]
PrivateKey = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Address = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

PostUp = iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wg+ -j MASQUERADE
PreDown = iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -o wg+ -j MASQUERADE

PostUp = iptables -I OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark $(wg show %i fwmark) -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT && ip6tables -I OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark $(wg show %i fwmark) -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT

PreDown = iptables -D OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark $(wg show %i fwmark) -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT && ip6tables -D OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark $(wg show %i fwmark) -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT

[Peer]
PublicKey = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0,::0/0
Endpoint = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

where

PostUp = iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wg+ -j MASQUERADE
PreDown = iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -o wg+ -j MASQUERADE

are responsible for properly routing traffic coming in from outside the container and

PostUp = iptables -I OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark $(wg show %i fwmark) -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT && ip6tables -I OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark $(wg show %i fwmark) -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT

PreDown = iptables -D OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark $(wg show %i fwmark) -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT && ip6tables -D OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark $(wg show %i fwmark) -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT

is your standard kill-switch meant to block traffic going out of any network interface except the tunnel interface in the event of the tunnel going down.

The wireguard-server container has these PostUPs and -Downs:

PostUp = iptables -A FORWARD -i %i -j ACCEPT; iptables -A FORWARD -o %i -j ACCEPT; iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

default rules that come with the template and allow for routing packets through the server tunnel

PostUp = wg set wg0 fwmark 51820

the traffic out of the tunnel interface get marked

PostUp = ip -4 route add 0.0.0.0/0 via {WG_CLIENT_IP} table 51820

add a rule to routing table 51820 for routing all packets through the wireguard-client container

PostUp = ip -4 rule add not fwmark 51820 table 51820

packets not marked should use routing table 51820

PostUp = ip -4 rule add table main suppress_prefixlength 0

respect manual rules added to main routing table

PostUp = ip route add {LAN_SUBNET} via {DOCKER_SUBNET_GATEWAY_IP} dev eth0

route packages with a destination in {LAN_SUBNET} to the actual {LAN_SUBNET} of the host

PostDown = iptables -D FORWARD -i %i -j ACCEPT; iptables -D FORWARD -o %i -j ACCEPT; iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE; ip route del {LAN_SUBNET} via {DOCKER_SUBNET_GATEWAY_IP} dev eth0

delete those rules after the tunnel goes down

PostUp = iptables -I OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark 0xca6c -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT && ip6tables -I OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark 0xca6c -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT
PreDown = iptables -D OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark 0xca6c -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT && ip6tables -D OUTPUT ! -o %i -m mark ! --mark 0xca6c -m addrtype ! --dst-type LOCAL -j REJECT

Basically the same kill-switch as in wireguard-client, but with the mark manually substituted since the command it relied on didn’t work in my server container for some reason and AFAIK the mark actually doesn’t change.

Now do I actually need the kill-switch in wireguard-server? Is the kill-switch in wireguard-client sufficient? I’m not even sure anymore.

Oh I’m fully aware. I personally don’t care, but one could add a capable VPS and deploy the Wireguard Host Container + two Client Containers, one for the LAN and one for the commercial VPN (like so), if the internet connection of the LAN in question isn’t sufficient.

Oh, neat! Never noticed that option in the Wireguard app before. That’s very helpful already. Regarding your opnsense setup:

I’ve dabbled in some (simple) routing before, but I’m far from anything one could call competent in that regard and even if I’d read up properly before writing my own routes/rules, I’d probably still wouldn’t trust that I hadn’t forgotten something to e.g. prevent IP/DNS leaks.

I’m mainly relying on a Docker and was hoping for pointers on how to configure a Wireguard host container to route only internet traffic through another Wireguard Client container.

I found this example, which is pretty close to my ideal setup. I’ll read up on that.

The export/import functionality is, yes. This implementation uses the same API endpoints, but the main reason for this existing:

An instance I was on slowly died, starting with the frontend (default web UI). At least at the time, no client implemented the export/import functionality, so I wrote a simple script in Bash to download the user data, if the backend still works.

Running a script can still be a challenge to some users, so I wrote a web application with the same functionality.

It’s a bit redundant if we’re talking about regularly working instances, but can be of use if the frontend isn’t available for some reason.

Good call, I’ll add some explanations, kinda forgot about those.

EDIT: Done.

Yep!

I prefer Lemmy for:

• actually engaging with content (commenting/posting/voting) instead of simply consuming. By the time the API restrictions came around and the ads/bots started to dominate, it felt pointless to engage on Reddit any more.
• the positive parts of the federated and FOSS nature. Choose an instance, build your own, use or build any client you want to, federate or defederate whoever you want.

I prefer Reddit for:

• getting info/recommendations on things. The knowledge base is magnitudes larger than anything Lemmy can offer atm. Also, due to the centralized nature, it’s so much easier to search for something on Reddit.

Lemmy’s got some problems and I can’t stand the interinstance drama, also, due to the decentralized nature, some instances can’t keep up or the admins don’t care any more, so whole communities can essentially be held hostage or simply die until a toolset to move a community from one instance to another (and propagate the change properly to the Fediverse) becomes available.