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Why would you want to expose it to the web in the first place? In a homelab scenario, you're the only one who needs access, so putting it behind a VPN comes at zero convenience or monetary cost.
My homelab stuff I like to be able to access from places that take all my free time (like work), making things accessible is a bit of a requirement for me.
That's fair, but I still can't see how a VPN connection makes your stuff less accessible - at least to you.
Just by making it so I can't access from a system I don't control. Like say I need to retrieve a document from my house, but I'm in a SCIF, or a waiting room, or anywhere else I wouldn't have my personal device, it's super useful to just connect to something like Nextcloud and pull it down.
I didn't say you should put your Nextcloud instance behind a VPN. Mine is public too.
I'm saying you should put your administrative access behind a VPN. SSH, reverse proxy admin panel, you name it. You need not do administrative stuff from work.
Oh yeah, I 100% agree with that, honestly two VPNs are better given you wouldn't want your normal VPN to terminate into your management vlan (nor should you want your management vlan to have access to the internet). I thought we were just discussing normal homelab stuff, all administrative stuff should really be oob.
So setup a VPN
Hmm... Where I work setting up a VPN on my work machine would not only break my workflow, it would probably cost me my job. Plus I'm not a big fan of giving computers I don't control access to the internals of my network. Reverse proxies were invented for a reason, no reason not to use one.
I think you might be drastically misunderstanding what a reverse proxy does.
Reverse proxy: Gives EVERY computer a direct connection to your network if you make it public, which it certainly sounds like you mean.
VPN: gives only you access to your internals.
In terms of connecting from work and not allowing some untrusted computer, there's a hundred different options, even running portable QEMU from a USB and using that trusted virtual machine to connect.
USB's are another really big no-no where I work, and running a different OS on my work network would 100% throw a lot of flags in our SOC as it's essentially plugging a rogue device into the network. In my understanding, a reverse proxy allows access to specific resources, if configured properly it only allows access to your DMZ.
VPNs allow you to become part of a virtual network (like one you aren't physically connected to), frequently providing access as though you are directly connected to the whole network. I could set up a VPN to my DMZ I suppose, but that just feels weird as hell as the whole point of a DMZ is to be an area you allow the public internet to reach (sometimes requiring authenticating to the reverse proxy).
The context of this entire discussion is connecting to internal services; the kind you wouldn't have in your DMZ, as that has no privileged access to your network.
Anyhoo, you do you, but I certainly wouldn't make public a reverse proxy with access to my internals.