I just setup a minecraft server on an old laptop, but to make it acessible i needed to open up a port. Currently, these are the ufw rules i have. when my friends want to connect, i will have them find their public ip and ill whilelist only them. is this secure enough? thanks
`Status: active
To Action From
22/tcp ALLOW Anywhere Anywhere ALLOW my.pcs.local.ip`
also, minecraft is installed under a separate user, without root privlege
To be fair, if something is open by default or very easy to enable without informing about the risks, tons of people will have it exposed without thinking.
It isn’t that “tons of people do it so it is normal and perfectly fine” but more “people don’t realize.” It also uses some nontrivial amount of resources to process and block those attempts, even if they never have a chance of getting in.
There is yet a reason I can find to have it forwarded for home use. Need to ssh into a machine to fix it? VPN.
There are plenty of secure web-based tools to manage your server without a VPN also.
A large percentage of those hosts with SSH enabled are cloud machines because it’s standard for cloud machines to be only accessible by SSH by default. I’ve never seen a serious security guide that says to set up a VPN and move SSH behind the VPN, although some cloud instances are inherently like this because they’re on a virtual private network managed by the hosting provider for other reasons.
SSH is much simpler and more universal than a VPN. You can often use SSH port forwarding to access services without configuring a VPN. Recommending everyone to set up a VPN for everything makes networking and remote access much more complicated for new users.
OK that is fair, though that is not self hosted…
VPS machines are a completely different beast than self hosting. But I guess I only said home use, not specifically self-hosting though we are in a self-hosted community. There are 1000 guides for setting up a VPN on your home network.