this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
95 points (95.2% liked)

Selfhosted

48471 readers
747 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I've been running my server without a firewall for quite some time now, I have a piped instance and snikket running on it. I've been meaning to get UFW on it but I've been too lazy to do so. Is it a necessary thing that I need to have or it's a huge security vulnerability? I can only SSH my server from only my local network and must use a VPN if I wanna SSH in outside so I'd say my server's pretty secure but not the furthest I could take it. Opinions please?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 62 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Disclaimer, I'm not a network professional im only learning. But you dont need ufw since your router firewall should be able to filter majority of the traffic. But in security there is a concept of layers. You want your router firewall then your device firewall to provide multiple layers incase something slips through one layer.

So to give a simple answer, it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up. 5sec of config might stop a hacker traversing your network hoping from device to device.

[–] farcaller@fstab.sh 30 points 3 months ago

This is the best answer. Your router protects you from the outside, but a local firewall can protect you from someone prodding your lan from a hacked camera or some other IoT device. By having a firewall locally you just minimize the attack surface further.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This. It's unnecessary but it's another layer.

[–] elvith@feddit.org 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Instead of thinking with layers, you should use think of Swiss cheese. Each slice of cheese has some holes - think of weaknesses in the defense (or intentional holes as you need a way to connect to the target legitimately). Putting several slices back to back (in random order and orientation) means that the way to penetrate all layers is not a simple straight way, but that you need to work around each layer.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've heard this analogy before but I don't really care for it myself.

It creates a mental image but isn't really analogous.

In the case of a firewall on a server behind a NAT, ports forwarded through the NAT are holes through the first several slices.

[–] elvith@feddit.org 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If done correctly, those may only be open from the internet, but not from the local network. While SSH may only be available from your local network - or maybe only by the fixed IP of your PC. Other services may only be reachable, when coming from the correct VLAN (assuming you did segment your home network). Maybe your server can only access the internet, but not to the home network, so that an attacker has a harder time spreading into your home network (note: that's only really meaningful, if it's not a software firewall on that same server...)

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com -5 points 3 months ago

Sure mate, keep trotting out the dumb swiss cheese analogy. Fine by me.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world -5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can't trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there's no way I'm wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

PS: Sure, people don't like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you're talking to - OP didn't understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can't trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

IMO: Exactly the reverse. That's how we get clients clicking and agreeing to everything presented without for once thinking critically.

In 6 working years (MSP) I had probably less than 10 occurrences of clients questioning a security concept from their own action.
If we didnt protect them from their own stupidity, the amount of cyber breaches would explode...

Just recently:
A client: I clicked on the box that is asking me for domain credentials.

The client didnt say what type of window it was or what happened before/after.
The client juat contacted us, because the pc wouldnt connect to the network and thus was unusable... >_>

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Possibly it's about personality types. I was only going on my own experience. Of always being told by a chorus of experts "Oh no you don't want to do that!" and ending up being terrified to touch anything. When I now know that I usually had nothing to be afraid of, because dangerous things tend to be locked down by design, exactly as they should be.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

Until they arent.
They are experts because they knew what clicking the wrong button might do.
E.g.: Database admins using the wrong script with a miscconfigured argument or a backup admin responding to a failover, tripple checking every setting to not create a problematic failover and then still clicking the wrong button causing an outage because some random behaviour caused an overload.

It happens. And best case you were better (double or tripple) safe than sorry.