I set up an *arr stack and made it work, and now I’m trying to make it safe - the objectivly correct order.
I installed uncomplicated firewall on the system to pretend to protect myself, and opened ports as and when I needed them.
So I’m in mind to fix my firewall rules and my question is this: Given there’s a more sensible ufw rule set what is it, I have looked online I couldn’t find any answers? Either “limit 8080”, “limit 9696”, “limit …” etc. or “open”. Or " allow 192.168.0.0/16" would I have to allow my docker’s subnet as well?
To head off any “why didn’t you <brilliant idea>?” it’s because I’m dumb. Cheers in advance.
Basically, what they are getting at is:
Have you allowed internet access TO arr?
A default config ISP router will take the public IP address and drop all incomming connections. It will then NAT internal IP addresses to the public IP addresses.
So when you go to Google, Google responds to the established connection coming from the routers public IP address. Your router then knows to forward that response to the local client that started the connection.
If Google just randomly decided to connect to your public IP address, your router is configured to drop that traffic.
If you set up port forwarding on your router, you are telling it “if you get a new connection on port 443, forward it to this local client”. This is exposing that client to the internet and allowing strangers to connect to it. If Google then tried to connect to your public ip:443, it would get the response from that local client.
If you set up a “dmz” client, the router will forward ALL unknown incoming connections to that client. There is no need to do this. The only exception is for research or as a hunnypot/tarpit.
All other traffic will be on the local network, and wont even touch the routers firewall. A connection from 192.168.0.12 to 192.168.0.200 will go through layer 2 (ie, switches) instead of layer 3 (ie, routing) of the network OSI layers.
So, if you trust your internal home network and you have not exposed anything to the internet (port forwarding on the router, or set up a DMZ client) then you dont really need internal firewalls: the chance of a malicious device being able to even connect to an arr service is vanishingly small - like, your arr service will be the least of your concerns.
When you expose arr to the internet (i wouldnt do it directly, use a VPN or similar as a secure hole through your home firewall) THEN you need to address internal firewalls.
If you feel you do need them, then go about it for learning purposes and take your time. Do things, break things, learn things, fix things.
In an ideal scenario, security would be in many layers, connections would all be TLS with client certificate trust, etc etc.
But for a server on your home network serving only local clients… Why bother worrying about it until you want to learn it properly!
I was starting to get annoyed by so much “*arrs” and dancing around the subject that I lost the motivation to type. Thank you for taking the time to type an answer similar to mine. :).
@[email protected] go read this.