[HN Gopher] Access your Raspberry Pi without a public IP
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       Access your Raspberry Pi without a public IP
        
       Author : ghoshbishakh
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2024-10-18 19:02 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (pinggy.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (pinggy.io)
        
       | supportengineer wrote:
       | How/why would I trust "xrdp" and/or pinggy.io? It sounds like I'm
       | allowing them unfettered access into my home network.
        
         | josephcsible wrote:
         | xrdp is the standard Linux RDP server and is probably provided
         | by your distro, which you have to trust anyway. And that `ssh
         | -R` command only gives pinggy.io access to the host:port you
         | specify, not your entire network.
        
           | dlachausse wrote:
           | In theory what you're saying is true, but in practice if
           | someone gains access to a machine on your network it becomes
           | significantly easier to gain access to additional machines on
           | your network.
        
           | hedora wrote:
           | It's had remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in recent
           | years, and I know of no Linux distribution that configures it
           | to listen on an external port by default.
           | 
           | Pinggy does seem to support incoming IP whitelists, at least.
        
       | resoluteteeth wrote:
       | > However, all of these methods usually require port forwarding,
       | which can pose security risks.
       | 
       | Except that pinggy appears to be an ngrok clone which is
       | basically equivalent to port forwarding in terms of security
       | 
       | If you don't want to expose the port for security reasons you are
       | better off using tailscale/zerotier/wireguard
        
         | mossTechnician wrote:
         | How do you tell Pinggy is closer to ngrok than Tailscale? To me
         | (I've never used any of these services) they all look more or
         | less the same, with slightly different interfaces. I wouldn't
         | know _how_ to distinguish a more secure option from a less
         | secure one.
         | 
         | I see somebody else also mentioned Raspberry Pi itself has a
         | similar service.
        
           | abound wrote:
           | > How do you tell Pinggy is closer to ngrok than Tailscale?
           | 
           | Taking a quick look at the article, it seems like you route
           | traffic _through_ Pinggy, whereas Tailscale is mostly (minus
           | the TURN stuff) peer to peer with some NAT-busting
        
             | PLG88 wrote:
             | The main difference is that Pinggy works via a public IP,
             | whereas Tailscale is a private network overlay. Pinggy
             | falls into the bucket of solutions like ngrok, zrok,
             | Tailscale 'Funnel', Cloudflare Tunnel etc.
        
         | PLG88 wrote:
         | Except its not. Port forwarding exposes your local environment
         | to the internet, unrestricted. Pinggy (and other sharing
         | platforms - https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling)
         | share a resource on a public IP, which should be at the very
         | least behind basic auth. The 'better alternative' you describe
         | is an overlay network. These things have different purposes.
        
           | resoluteteeth wrote:
           | OK, looking into it more it appears that pinggy actually has
           | pretty good options for adding authentication (I guess that's
           | what you were referring to by basic authentication, not just
           | the service being exposed having basic authentication) and
           | based on that it does seem that it could be more secure than
           | just forwarding the port if the service being exposed doesn't
           | have built in authentication, and that would make me a lot
           | more tempted to use it.
           | 
           | The article for some reason didn't explain that at all or
           | show examples using pinggy's authentication features. If the
           | article had talked about that, the assertion about being more
           | secure would have made a lot more sense.
        
             | PLG88 wrote:
             | Agreed. It surprises me that many of these services do not
             | either lead with auth or have it as an important secondary.
             | For many, port forwarding is a pain, so it solves that, but
             | the security IMHO is just as important.
             | 
             | It's a shame lists like -
             | https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling - do not
             | call this out. fwiw, the one I work on, zrok.io (in truth,
             | I work on its parent project, OpenZiti) has that hardening
             | and auth because we believe its vital.
        
       | james_pm wrote:
       | Or just use https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/connect/
        
         | dlachausse wrote:
         | Thank you! I never knew about this.
        
         | ghoshbishakh wrote:
         | Oh! Something like this exists! Thanks for sharing.
        
       | ta988 wrote:
       | How is it different from tmate that allows to use ssh keys for
       | auth?
        
       | waingake wrote:
       | Here is a much better technique which only relies on SSH
       | https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/ssh-and-http-raspberr...
        
       | emmelaich wrote:
       | If you do this or similar, choose very good passwords because it
       | is certain to be probed.
       | 
       | Also consider using the whitelist option.
        
       | sleepybrett wrote:
       | tailscale/wireguard
        
       | morninglight wrote:
       | AT&T Archives on YouTube.
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB8B8220DEE96FD9
        
       | Its_Padar wrote:
       | These are certainly good ways to go about it, but
       | https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/connect/ does exist and is
       | completely free and pretty easy to use
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-21 23:00 UTC)