Setting up Baikal

I’ve managed to set up a baikal server to sync my calendars and tasks instead of using a free cloud service provided by nextcloud. I’m able to reach it from beyond my local network, but this is all very new to me and I’m a little worried about what permanently leaving a port open for this.

I’m hoping to find some resources for securing this, before leaving it up all the time. I suppose as an alternative I can always only run it at home and only sync when I’m home but this seems less ideal.

Thanks a bunch for the help in advance. I really appreciate it.

Jerry1098,

Just in case you never heard of it, there is also the option to use Tailscale. It lets you connect to your services without opening any ports and uses Wireguard under the hood but makes configuration simpler

Corr,

I have wireguard set up now and its working completely fine now. Thanks for the recommendation!

drudoo,

Use a reverse proxy in front and be sure to have auth setup in Baikal.

I’ve been using it with traefik for 5ish years now without issues.

BitSound,

Wireguard might work well here. You’ll have to set it up on each device you want to have access your server, but I’m guessing that syncing only involves a handful of devices, which wouldn’t be bad.

Corr,

So if I understand this correctly, I configure wireguard on the server end and port forward to the IP for the wireguard interface? and then configure devices to send packets through their wireguard interface for specific applications to get synced up? Thanks for your reply :)

BitSound,

Yeah, when you configure it, you essentially say “all traffic to 1.2.3.0/24 should go through this wireguard connection”. Then, your OS automagically knows “oh, this connection to 1.2.3.4 should go through Wireguard, and I’ll handle it like so”. You don’t have to configure any applications specifically, their network connections just get routed appropriately by your OS.

Corr,

So I’m just taking a look at wireguard on android. I just need to point a specific address to wireguard and it takes care of it then? This seems relatively straightforward to configure.

Last question (hopefully). I’m running this server off a pi with bullseye. The guide on their site for setting up a server uses buster but the client uses bullseye. The buster version needs to setup unstable release packages but the bullseye client doesn’t. This should mean that I’m good to just grab the default Debian package on bullseye?

Thank you very much for your help with this!

Patrick,

If you want an (even) simpler wireguard setup, you could also look into pivpn.io for the server side.

Corr,

This seems promising for simplicity. I’ll check it out!

BitSound,

Yeah, you’ll also need to configure your server to whitelist your phone, and then everything should just work. And yeah, you should be able to just use the default deb package on bullseye.

Corr,

I think I’ve configured it all (using the the link the other person sent). I think I screwed up the port forwarding tho and I’m not home to fix it for now.

Everything looks like it should work but only time will tell lol. Thank you again for your help!

Corr, (edited )

So I got home and fixed my port-forwarding rule, but I can’t get my phone to connect. That aside, I’m now a bit lost as to how to get access to baikal , or anything else… I can’t seem to find any resources that explain how to do this either. Do you know of anything I can read to try to set that up?

Edit: I sorted out reaching the baikal server from the VPN. Still working on getting my android phone to work with wireguard tho :/

Edit: I apparently can’t read and mistyped a key value. Turns out everything has been working this whole time 🤦

BitSound,

I unfortunately can’t really offer much advice here. I configured Wireguard on my phone by essentially copy/pasting the configuration from my laptop and changing the values as necessary like the public key and client IP address. Turned it on, it activated VPN mode in Android and everything started working.

I guess make sure you haven’t mixed up your public/private keys, your server knows about the new device (and is restarted), and your phone is using the right IP address as basic troubleshooting steps.

Corr,

I added a final edit where it turns out I just mistyped the public key and the rest of the config was completely fine. Oops lol. Thanks for your input on this I really appreciate it. Now final question. Since my server now works on a whitelist basis, it should be reasonably safe to leave the port open indefinitely going forward? If not, is there more I should consider doing to increase security?
Thanks again :)

BitSound,

Security is a gradient that depends on your threat model, etc, but unless you’re being targeted by a nation-state or something that should be plenty secure

thelittleblackbird,

As a friendly suggestion: Don’t rely on wireguard alone, try instead services like tailscale or zerotier because if you set up ur server in residential zone, there are huge chances that you will hit some cg-nat in other cities / countries.

Those are nasty problems that wireguard is not able to solve but those programs can

Apart of that this is the zero risk approach and it should be the default one.

wildbus8979,

There are a number of options…

Setup a reverse proxy with nginx, using SSL, with http auth or better yet client certificates.

Setup a VPN to access your home network.

Use SSH forwarding to access the local service.

Corr,

Are these all roughly equivalent in security? Or is it a case of some of these being a bit less complex to set up but you sacrifice security? I’ll look into these options though. Thank you

wildbus8979,

If setup correctly they are mostly equivalent.

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