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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Do I really need a firewall for my server? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been running my server without a firewall for quite some time now, I have a piped instance and snikket running on it. I've been meaning to get UFW on it but I've been too lazy to do so. Is it a necessary thing that I need to have or it's a huge security vulnerability? I can only SSH my server from only my local network and must use a VPN if I wanna SSH in outside so I'd say my server's pretty secure but not the furthest I could take it. Opinions please?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (4 children)

You should, yes. I run a firewall (I usually use ufw) on all of my Internet-connected devices, since all of my devices run Linux. There's not really any good reason not to in 2025.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

But is there a good reason to run one on a server? Any port that's not in use won't allow traffic in. Any port that's in use would be added to the firewall exception anyway.

The only reasons I can think of to use a firewall are:

some services aren't intending to be accessible - with containers, this is really easy to prevent
your firewall also does other stuff, like blocking connections based on source IP (e.g. block Russia and China to reduce automated cyber attacks if you don't have users in Russia or China)

Be intentional about everything you run, because each additional service is a potential liability.

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