this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Personal domain or not? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Sajberspejs@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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I have a personal domain name. I got it because my first name was available with my country tld.

I use it for email, which I will most likely keep forever, but how about my self-hosted stuff?

I use Slack's Nebula to access my self-hosted resources externally.

Would you mind exposing your VPS:es IP:s to the world by adding them as subdomains? In my case lighthouse1.myname.tld and lighthouse2.myname.tld?

I feel much more secure using DuckDNS for those IP:s as it should make it much harder to identify my attack surface.

Does it make sense or am I just paranoid?

I really don't like the idea of my attack surface being easily identifiable just by my email or first name.

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[–] nzipsi@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

IPs are exposed to the world by default. Bots will happily sit there 24/7 scanning the entire IPv4 range, so you’re unlikely to see any impact from having a subdomain vs not. As others have said, you’re better off focusing on making sure your VPS is secure - SSH keys only, HTTPS only, reverse proxy with authentication and strong passwords, etc, maybe configuring the firewall to completely drop packets that aren’t from your home IP to non-VPN ports (and use a VPN from outside the house).

Alternatively, if it’s just you and maybe one or two others, you could look at something like Tailscale or Cloudflare Tunnel, in which case the VPS would be calling out to someone else to open a tunnel, and you wouldn’t need any ports open. That adds a dependency on someone else, though, which may not be ideal.

[–] Sajberspejs@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah the IP:s are there for the world to see, but you won't easily know they belong to me unless I point to them from my domain.

I'm running a server at home without portforwarding. I connect to it using Nebula on VPS, which is like Tailscale without having to trust anyone.

[–] tech2but1@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah the IP:s are there for the world to see, but you won't easily know they belong to me unless I point to them from my domain.

As has been pointed out though, it makes no difference and no-one cares. No-one is manually cross referencing IP's and domains, and besides, what difference will it make anyway?

I've heard this argument before with someone saying they use DDNS on all customer sites instead of static IPs as it's "more secure" because there's a website out there with exposed desktops listed on it.