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posted by janrinok on Friday January 19 2018, @09:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the questions,-questions,-questions dept.
An Anonymous Coward asks:

I'm putting this under security because i'd like to keep this a private server for family:

that said, I'm wondering if you fine people can help me with the best way to set up a web server in my house to host the files on my external hard drives for family members in other cities/countries while, again, keeping it private and secure over the internet.

I'm looking into ngrok for url handling, but am not sure exactly if this is the best way to go.

Can anyone save me time and possible heartache and failure and provide me (and possibly others) with a walk-through of which software to use. Would love to do something like free, but may have to get a paid unique domain from, say, ngrok, to make it easier for family members to connect up.

Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi... you're my only hope!


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 19 2018, @10:04PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday January 19 2018, @10:04PM (#624946)

    If they're all uber-geeks, give them a single stunnel into your home system and have them send you public keys so they can ssh in and scp out whatever they want. If you use the system for other things, you might launch your ssh in a chrooted jail just granting access to what you want to share, but I'd highly recommend just hosting your external service on a dedicated machine like a NUC or similar. If this describes your family, welcome to the 0.001% of most technically savvy computer using families on the planet.

    I suspect your family members are going to want a point and click graphic browsing capability, probably accessed by standard web browsers. So, you might consider setting up an Apache site for them, and putting as many "pretty pages" as you feel like designing to help them navigate the content. As for security - the more secure you make it, the more time you're going to spend holding hands explaining to them why the security is keeping them locked out and how to get access, again. The dedicated server (maybe even just a dedicated VM, if you can tolerate the hassle associated with that), is a good idea, and I'd choose a random high number port to pass through your home router and expose to the internet - that should at least decrease the amount of script-kiddie/Russian mafia port-scan hacking your system has to endure.

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