So you’re saying your services run on a separate subnet? 255.255.0.0? How would you connect from your home pc connected to your home WiFi? I assume have the vpn running on the machine on a different subnet and also have it running in front of the service, the vpn would give your home computer an IP on the /16 subnet range? Am I correct in that assumption?
I suppose I need to get OPNsense actually working and providing a different subnet in the first place before worrying about all this, I appreciate your input! I understand about exposing the WAN IP, I’m assuming VPN tunnel for those specific services would protect my WAN IP as it would just send all my traffic to the VPN provider and then out to the actual destination, again correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t think I understand how the actual routing would work, how to hook the services into nginx proxy manager and how to know which ports to close and what not, but I suppose I’m not at that step quite yet
Dude this is awesome, thanks for your comment! It’s exactly the type of engagement I was hoping for, someone to help with a few key concepts. I’ll definitely be taking your advice to heart it sounds like you’ve been through the ringer with your own setup
I agree with you that running OPNsense in a VM is less than ideal but I figured as it would only affect my lab, I can deal with the occasional outage and this is more so I can learn first before going all in on a solution such as a netgate, I appreciate the suggestion there too. I’m not dead set on OPNsense I just figured a gui would be easier to navigate and it looked nice. I haven’t heard of suricata and mirroring WAN connection to pfsense, that definitely makes sense.
As for the VLANs I’m not dead set on that in particular either, the switch I have supported it and it made the most sense as to how to segment my network in that way. So you are saying you can also segment a LAN connection with just a firewall? It would make sense as you can set rules as to how a device can communicate with other devices on the network, is it rather cumbersome to set it up in that way? And on VLAN performance I would assume that would not be a problem as I am the only user who would be connecting to my media server, unless I had a bunch of services sending and receiving shitloads of data essentially?
I really appreciate all your help! You definitely sound like you’ve been doing this for a decade haha, very useful stuff. I might pop back and ask more questions later if you don’t mind