Hello. I have just recently started with self hosting my media with Jellyfin... and I am LOVING it! I had been carrying around media players for decades, with everyone looking at me like an insane crank for not giving up on my hundreds of gigs of media for SAS things like spotify... now they're jealous! We've come full circle!
Annnyway. Obviously, I want to access the server anywhere, and don't want to just raw-dog an open port to the internet- yikes!
There are SO MANY ways and guides and thoughts on this, I'm a bit overwhelmed and looking for your thoughts on the best way to start off... it doesn't have to be 'fort knox' and I am sure I'll adjust and pivot as I learn more... but here are the options I know of (did I miss any?):
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Tailscale VPN connection
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Reverse Proxy with Caddy or similar (this is recommended as easy in the jellyfin official guides and thus is my current leading contender!)
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Docker/VM 'containerized' server with permissions/access control
What are your thoughts on the beginner-friendly-ness and ease of setup/management of these? This is exclusively for use by me and my family, so I don't need something that's easy for anyone to access with credentials... just our handful of devices.
Please don't laugh, but I'm currently hosting on a Raspberry Pi5 with a big-ass harddrive attached (using CasaOS on a headless Ubuntu Server). I know this is JANK as far as self-hosting goes, and plan to upgrade to something like NAS in the future, but I'm still researching and learning, and aside from shitty video transcoding, it's working fine for now... Thank you in advance for your advice, help and thoughts!
VPN. Jellyfin is not intended for direct exposure to the Internet.
You should run it in docker anyway for convenience. A reverse proxy is optional, but I use traefik also for convenience (so that I can just use domain names on the same port, and so that it can automatically fetch certs).
Use the reverse proxy for access control ? Then you don't need to install extra software to access it remotely ?
I don't think jellyfin supports that either. I tried it a while back and only saw partial success.
Yes, that's the whole reason for the post, as I said above. When you say "docker anyway for convenience" what do you mean? What's the benefit of docker? Do you have any resources that would let someone entirely new to docker understand/guide through it? You mention Traefik as well... never heard of it till this post.... what is it? Why is it convenient?
Docker packs the whole application and its dependencies into a container, hence the name. You can run and delete that application as much as you want without affecting the host system. (But you should probably keep your media library and config outside the container, and use a bind mount. The setup documentation covers this.)
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/
Intended... not recommended. The reverse proxy one should also not be recommended until they resolve the unauthed endpoints issue as well really. Security is a weak point on Jellyfin in general.
I've tested the worst of these endpoints and they were already secured, just the issues haven't been updated.
For instance, from the security split-out issue list: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415#issuecomment-2825369811
I took the only one that could lead to admin/system infiltration (LDAP config escalation, others are about media access), and found it to have already been secured: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/13989
Yup, and these are the biggest risks IMO. I find the well organized, big media companies with deep pockets and a few basic scripts that we know to work to be the biggest vector of liability.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/1501
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415#issuecomment-2071798575 (and the following comments)
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/13984
A person's biggest threat running Jellyfin is going to be the media companies themselves. Sony (the company known for installing rootkits on people's computers) can pre-hash a list of their movies with commonly config'd locations/name schemas for their content and enumerate your system for if you have their content. Since you don't have any authentication on the endpoint, they're likely not violating any law through circumvention. The "random UUID" is just the MD5 hash of the path/filename. So it's actually highly guessable... especially for people using default docker configs and *arr stacks and you normalize names using these tools.
Their response was "this attack isn't in the wild"(as if they actually know... running a script and checking a few hundred thousand requests to go through a list of movies isn't all that taxing and users won't even notice it to report it... let alone have enough logging to notice it to begin with) and "it breaks compatability, so we don't want to do it". Which I find laughable. It turned me off from Jellyfin all together.
Edit: And because every time I bring up the issue I get downvoted for "fear mongering"... There are answers to resolve it... you need to use non-standard naming schemes in your files/folder structure and fail2ban. But that expects users to do that... And I could do that... but it's a security risk non-the-less and the developers response to the risk being what it is is what's scary to me.
Edit2: The LDAP one... I should clarify I don't care about that one since well... requires you to additionally config stuff that most users won't. But the media exposure issues are default and universal and require setting things "non-standard" to have any protection from, which users generally WON'T do.
Well, I wouldn't say the media issues are worse than a full domain access issue, but despite my comment above, I agree with you.
The security split-issue feels reminiscent of when Plex didn't use SSL and wouldn't implement it until a white-hat POC token exploit was produced and provided to them (of which I was the author). If JF was my project, these would be top of my list.
Well I don't mean to harp on it... Plex in this instance is much better off. When provided proof of the problem they fixed it. Jellyfin has had issues about this going back to 2019... 6 years ago. Still no fix in sight. And the first ticket I linked proved the concept can be abused. With the issues getting hidden because "We're closing this because we're consolidating... oh wait... we're closing it because we're splitting the issues out." I've legit had people tell me that the problems were fixed because they saw the issue closed.
And now I hear that JF is even deprecating SSL and mandating proxy or esoteric custom config to implement SSL themselves again... Seems they're going backwards?
I had Jellyfin setup for just myself because I'd love to get away from the risk of Plex screwing shit up (and to get off their SSO). But the frustration of the dev responses to some of these issues and the fact that I'm literally the only person who's able to deal with the restrictions needed to keep it secure... I just turned it off. I didn't want to deal with managing two systems because my kids/wife/other family couldn't figure out how to use it.
All fair. For me, their SSL direction is a good one. Most self-hosters use a central proxy, so why maintain one users just ask to disable.
I do run mine behind a VPN, always will and recommend others do the same.
They need to switch to cookie based auth instead of doing the weird thing with the URLs
Yeah the API token exposure in the URLs is another thing... And that can expose itself in all sorts of ways.