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I recently switched to Netbird on a VPS (on Vultr). Their reverse proxy is super easy to set up / self host. They also offer a free version that works pretty good too, I just wanted to make it difficult for myself (thats the whole point of self hosting, right? )
I have seen netbird pop around every now and again. I might try out their cloud free version first and if I like it I might try self hosting it.
So you host netbird on a vps you rent and that is used for reverse proxy? So with that reverse proxy I can have my home server be publicly accessible and I can have friends log in to my jellyfin server without having to connect to my tailnet.
My last concern is security. How is this set up good for making sure I don't just get constantly botted and exploited?
Opening jellyfin up publicly is kind of asking for trouble if you ask me. I haven't done so myself, but seen enough on this community and elsewhere to know that it's probably not a good idea.
By all means correct me if you know more, but what I tend to see is one or two people here saying that Jellyfin devs don't recommend exposing it publicly, only to be corrected by looking at the actual documentation. I suspect those cautioning against it are on outdated information and that Jellyfin carries much the same risk as exposing any other service.
I think what the devs are saying is 'don't expose Jellyfin to the public in an unsafe manner'. I don't run Jellyfin, but can confirm what you've read here. In that vein, don't expose anything to the public in an unsafe manner.
There is no safe manner of exposing jellyfin.
Again, I do not run Jellyfin, but what you're saying seems contradictory to what the devs are implying: here and here. Since I lack the hands on experience, I will leave the issue with the experts.
That first page says exposing it to the Internet is "not recommended". Putting a reverse proxy in front of it does not meaningfully change the security posture. A malicious request to
http://jellyfin.homelab.com/exploitable-pagewill be sent to jellyfin in effectively the same way, whether through a reverse proxy or not. You would need a WAF set up specifically to look for relevant exploit attempts.https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
Those are some outstanding known vulnerabilities, most of them unfixed. They are not particularly severe, but it shows that thorough security is not a priority for the jellyfin devs.
It says exposing a port directly to the internet is not recommended; do you know of any project that would recommend directly exposing a port? What is meaningfully different here?
Sure, any project designed to be exposed to the Internet. Web servers would be the most obvious.
Probably the number one recommendation I see in self hosting communities is to not open ports directly (other than for a reverse proxy). It seems like a common recommendation no matter the service. To be clear: I am a beginner. I know very little about this, but I've spent months learning. I can't say you're wrong, but I don't think you've made a convincing argument for me to actually understand why Jellyfin is unsafe to expose to the internet compared to any other service.
You are welcome to expose it at your own risk. Assess you own tolerance for compromise (personal data compromise, becoming part of a botnet, becoming a host for spam or CSAM) and proceed accordingly.
Yes, that's exactly what I've done. You still haven't shown me why it's unsafe. If you can't, that's fine. At some threshold or another, nothing is secure. The one thing I know for sure is that that first page, that says it doesn't recommend exposing a port, does not say what you said it does.
It sounds to me like you just have a higher risk tolerance, and if you accept that, that's okay.