this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Hey all,

I'm setting up a homeserver and trying to figure out the best way to access it remotely. I've been looking at different solutions, but I’m a little stuck.

I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP when I’m also trying to use a commercial VPN for privacy / to combat services fingerprinting me based on my IP.

I'm currently considering a reverse proxy setup with an authentication provider like authentik or authelia, but as far as I understand, that wouldn't work well with accessing services through an app on my mobile device (like for jellyfin music for example.) I did think about just opening up the ports and using a DDNS with a reverse proxy, but is'nt that like a big security risk?

Keep in mind I am no network admin, but I don’t have anything against learning if someone can point me in the right direction.

Also I heard some people say that on proxmox you should use unprivileged containers instead of vms for your services, does that hold up?

Any recommendations for tools or approaches?

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[–] Kagu@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I'll recommend netbird as its entirely running on your server, is free, and I found it way easier to set up compared to Tailscale/Headscale

[–] kratoz29@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So is this like a Tailscale alternative and not a way to expose your services?

[–] Kagu@lemmy.ml 2 points 22 hours ago

Correct. Its just a mesh VPN

[–] rektdeckard@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Are the free limits suitable for light media streaming by a few users? I'm currently running a simple setup with Caddy reverse proxy and port knocking, but my ISP doesn't do static IP and they change my address every few months.

[–] SirHaxalot@nord.pub 2 points 1 day ago

The free version is mainly just a number of user and device limit. Although the relaying service might be limited as well, but that should only matter if both of your clients have strict NAT, otherwise the Wireguard tunnels gets directly connected and no traffic goes through Netbirds managed servers.

You can also self-host the control plane with pretty much no limitations, and I believe you no longer need SSO (which increased the complexity a lot for homelab setups).

[–] Kagu@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think this may be a your milage may vary thing. I only personally use netbird for remote server management, as I barely consume anything other than streamed music remotely. I host netbird community edition on my server in a VM so the streaming quality isn't dependent on any tier of service purchased from the company