More technically there’s two ways to move data between two separate services. You can either pull or push the data.

Assume for both scenarios that the client is your phone and the server is some machine in the cloud.

With pulls the client calls an API and the server returns a response. Generally the www works this way. You ask a server for a wab page and you effectively pull the source down to your browser.

Pushes work the opposite, in that a server has data for the client and needs to push or otherwise give it to you. Pulls are relatively strait forward because every server has a well known name (the domain name and url). But your phone’s IP address changes constantly. So how does a server know how to contact your device? There’s generally two ways:

1. Your device can poll (make repeated pulls to a server checking for new data)
2. Or you can register some identifier and your IP address with some central server every time it changes. And then the server can essentially call a URL on your device directly. This is essentially what Google and Apple are doing as it doesn’t waste CPU resources and your battery.

You could in theory implement either of these yourself but because of the way the OSes work on both Android and iOS there’s no guarantee that you can keep a process running in the background forever. As the OS can kill your process if the OS needs more free ram, etc … The built in notification APIs are exempt from this because they are part of the OS.

If you’re worried about your IoT devices on your LAN the problem isn’t necessarily that they can access WAN but rather that there’s a security vulnerability and that they can be accessed by the WAN. Once a device is compromised and attacker can then use it as a “beachhead” to access other devices on your network.

So for example, with my setup every IoT device is on a separate VLAN (the guest network acts similarly) which can’t get access to WAN, can’t be accessed from the WAN and can’t initiate any network calls to any other VLAN. Now my primary VLAN can talk to my IoT VLAN, and IoT can talk back, it just can’t start the communication.

This does pose a problem for TVs though that need to talk to Jellyfin as hinted at in the original post. So what you could do is create a specific firewall rule that allows the TVs to at least initiate communication to Jellyfin but not any other device on your primary VLAN. This will probably require a more sophisticated router though than most of the consumer ones out there. Just be mindful that if n IoT device is compromised they can then try to attack the jellyfin server to jump to your other VLAN and then the rest of your network.

Just wanted to add… After reading your initial post I did some more digging on adding tracking headers, etc… especially by T-Mobile.

While it’s definitely a thing, it only applies to HTTP traffic. Even HTTPS blocks their ability to add those headers. So any traffic that’s using any other protocol (DNS, email, ssh, or just gaming, etc…) would be safe from your ISP from at least trying to add these tracking headers.

Yes but while the service is targeted for home use there still is remote work which generally requires a VPN back to the company network. They wouldn’t be able to block this. Now sure they might be more inclined to block Mullvad but they’d impact too many businesses by blocking wireguard as a whole.

And assuming they did block Mullvad but not wireguard… Just rent a VPS and install a wireguard server and client there to bridge back to Mullvad.

I know this doesn’t help much but I use T-Mobile cell towers with an always on VPN with no issue. But I don’t see why they’d block Mullvad. (I’d be more concerned that they’d block them than wireguard in general). But there’s completely legitimate reasons to use both so I don’t see them really bothering to block either.

If it was a certificate issue I’d expect youd just get an error from your browser saying the cert is invalid or expired.

If I had to guess though you’re running into a nat reflection issue: https://nordvpn.com/cybersecurity/glossary/nat-loopback/

Read up on that. But you may need to provide different DNS entries if you’re inside or outside your LAN or add a NAT hairpin rule to your router. But this is only applicable if you’re exposing the same service to the WWW.

Some other things to try though:

• Have you tried just pinging the address? Is the DNS resolution returning the address you expect?
• Whats in your nginx logs? Do you see anything when you try and connect?
• Within your nginx container can you ping your service directly? Is something blocking nginx from accessing the site?

Because of changes in how the lemmy API works I had to abandon the project awhile back.

The GitHub page is still up and if anyone wants to take over they’re more than welcome. But the project would need a complete rewrite in order to function and even then there’d still be limitations.

I’ve tried commenting out the ports in the compose file, which should make them only available on the internal network, I thought. But when I do that, the containers can no longer connect to each other.

Did you create an explicit network for them to talk on? Otherwise the default docker network doesn’t support internal DNS queries.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/network/#container-networks

Specifically you need a network using the bridge driver: https://docs.docker.com/engine/network/drivers/bridge/

Can you share the Home Assistant automation / setup that you have for Uptime Kuma notifications? As I’m in the same boat as you. I just got a webhook setup but I’m getting flooded with notifications, especially after services update.

My hope is I just want to be notified when a particular service is down for say 5 minutes but all I care about is knowing the node name. I don’t necessarily care to get notified if the service comes back up.

Yes it would. In my case though I know all of the users that should have remote access snd I’m more concerned about unauthorized access than ease of use.

If I wanted to host a website for the general public to use though, I’d buy a VPS and host it there. Then use SSH with private key authentication for remote management. This way, again, if someone hacks that server they can’t get access to my home lan.

Their setup sounds similar to mine. But no, only a single service is exposed to the internet: wireguard.

The idea is that you can have any number of servers running on your lan, etc… but in order to access them remotely you first need to VPN into your home network. This way the only thing you need to worry about security wise is wireguard. If there’s a security hole / vulnerability in one of the services you’re running on your network or in nginx, etc… attackers would still need to get past wireguard first before they could access your network.

But here is exactly what I’ve done:

1. Bought a domain so that I don’t have to remember my IP address.
2. Setup DDNS so that the A record for my domain always points to my home ip.
3. Run a wireguard server on my lan.
4. Port forwarded the wireguard port to the wireguard server.
5. Created client configs for all remote devices that should have access to my lan.

Now I can just turn on my phone’s VPN whenever I need to access any one of the services that would normally only be accessible from home.

P.s. there’s additional steps I did to ensure that the masquerade of the VPN was disabled, that all VPN clients use my pihole, and that I can still get decent internet speeds while on the VPN. But that’s slightly beyond the original ask here.

A couple of options in my opinion, as I just did this myself:

You can use the CLI tool to “upload” them. You can even do this from the server itself. So upload times would be as fast as your network card can process or however fast your server is, whichever is slower. It does require that you create an API key for the user in question though.

Otherwise you can create an external library and link that to your account. Now Immich will still index this library but it won’t move or manage the actual files. I’m not sure though if it looks at those files for duplicates (i.e. if you try and upload the same photo from your phone to the server). This external library will also prevent deleting photos as well, FYI.

There might be other options that I’m not aware of, as I’ve only been using Immich for about a month now.

Edit: link to the CLI documentation: https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface/

Cloudflare? Namecheap?

Not sure exactly what features you’re after but the vast majority of them support what you mentioned above.

Assuming the fediverse becomes mainstream one thing I hope to actually see is that existing company forums start to join the fediverse.

Think if you no longer needed to login to EA’s website to post about bugs to the Sims. Or if Prusa’s 3d printer community forums could also be found right here… Or any other existing community help forum.

The problem though is, that in order to get there, Meta and others have to bring the users and essentially show the way first.