Ah ok. You aren’t doing auth. I don’t understand how this is relevant.

Are you doing auth in the reverse proxy for Jellyfin? Do you use Chromecast or any non-web interface? If so I’m very interested how you got it to work.

The concern is that it would be nice if the UNIX users and LDAP is automatically in sync and managed from a version controlled source. I guess the answer is just build up a static LDAP database from my existing configs. It would be nice to have one authoritative system on the server but I guess as long as they are both built from one source of truth it shouldn’t be an issue.

Yes, LDAP is a general tool. But many applications that I am interested in using it for user information. That is what I want to use it for. I’m not really interested in storing other data.

I think you are sort of missing the goal of the question. I have a bunch of self-hosted services like Jellyfin, qBittorrent, PhotoPrism, Metabase … I want to avoid having to configure users in each one individually. I am considering LDAP because it is supported by many of these services. I’m not concerned about synchronizing UNIX users, I already have that solved. (If I need to move those to LDAP as well that can be considered, but isn’t a goal).

I do use a reverse proxy but for various reasons you can’t just block off some apps. For example if you want to play Jellyfin on a Chromecast or similar, or PhotoPrism if you want to use sharing links. Unfortunately these systems are designed around the built-in auth and you can’t just slap a proxy in front.

I do use nginx with basic with in front of services where I can. I trust nginx much more than 10 different services with varying quality levels. But unfortunately not all services play well.

How are you configuring this? I checked for Jellyfin and their are third-party plugins which don’t look too mature, but none of them seem to work with apps. qBittorrent doesn’t support much (actually I may be able to put reverse-proxy auth in front… I’ll look into that) and Metabase locks SSO behind a premium subscription.

IDK why but it does seem that LDAP is much more widely supported. Or am I missing some method to make it work

But the problem is that most self-hosted apps don’t integrate well with these. For example qBittorrent, Jellyfin, Metabase and many other common self-hosted apps.

NixOS makes it very easy to declaratively configure servers. For example the users config to manage UNIX users: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options#opt-users.users

Yet another service to maintain. If the server is crashing you can’t log in, so you need backup UNIX users anyways.

I mean it is always better to have more open source. But the point of the multi-hop system is that you don’t need to trust the server. Even if the server was open source:

1. You wouldn’t know that we are running an unmodified version.
2. If you need to trust the server then someone could compel us to tap it or monitor it.

The open source client is enough to verify this and the security of the whole scheme.

I use NixOS.

Mullvad is one of the best options if you care about privacy. They take privacy seriously, both on their side and pushing users towards private options. They also support fully anonymous payments. Their price is also incredibly reasonable.

I’m actually working on a VPN product as well. It is a multi-hop system so that we can’t track you. But it isn’t publicly available yet, so in the meantime I happily recommend Mullvad.

These are real issues however they are pretty easy to mitigate, and I would say that the upsides of a password manager far outweigh the downsides.

1. Make sure that you are regularly typing your master password for the first bit. After that you’ll never forget it. You can also help them out by saving a copy of their master password for them at least until they are sure they have memorized it. There are also password managers where you can recovery your account as long as you have the keys cached on at least one device.

2. This is far, far outweighed by the risk of password reuse. This is because when a single one of the sites you use gets hacked then people will take that credential list and try it on every other site. So with a password manager there is just one target, without it is one of hundreds of sites where you reused your password. Many password managers also have end-to-end encryption so without your password the sync service can’t be hacked (as it doesn’t have access to your passwords).