What are the security implications for a server at home?

[Casimir]

I heard that it is not a good idea to host a server at your own home. But I would like to have a small nodetest-server to test how it behaves and to experiment with some other things.
So what are the security issues that come with it and how could I avoid them?
Would it be better to use a paid solution than my raspberry pi?

[rubenwardy]

The main one I can think of is people will know your IP Address.

There also might be bad bugs in the software, that override your software.

And there may be vulnerabilities in your home network.

[Megaf]

I heard that it is not a good idea to host a server at your own home. But I would like to have a small nodetest-server to test how it behaves and to experiment with some other things.
So what are the security issues that come with it and how could I avoid them?

Casimir,

It depends on a lot of factors. I believe it's pretty safe to host a minetest server at your home, you just have to know something about things like DMZ and NAT.

At my home I'm running two minetest server, so I set up two NATs, one for port 30003 and other for 30002. All other ports are either closed or invisible.

The major issue is exposing your IP to the world, but that happens too when you download a torrent for example.

Would it be better to use a paid solution than my raspberry pi?

It depends, I asked myself that several times.
The answer was, it depends.
Using a paid solutions like a VPS, can be cheap and you will have access to really good links speeds, like 100 mbps or even more! So linkwise you can host dozens of players without any problem.
Problem is, a VPS have it's resources shared among several users, so if you are lucky you will have quite a lot of power only for you, if not, players on your server will experience a painful lag.

I used to have a linode VPS, paying around 20 USD/month for 8 core XEON CPU. But doing some test I noticed that even an old computer at my home could out perform that VPS.

Now a days I'm happy running two servers at my home. Only problem for me is my low internet speed, only 100 KB/s of upload, so I set the player limit to 7 in one server and 11 in another..

It may not be a good idea to use your Raspberry Pi for a real server, unless you use a quite tuned game as I'm doing, I'm making such game and I hope to get it to the point that is reliable enough so I can publish it on this forum.

You may have read already the topic about my Raspberry Pi server https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9158
Take a look at this comment I made on another topic here https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9138#p139136

[sfan5]

so I set up two NATs

Port forwards*

[mauvebic]

so I set up two NATs

Port forwards*

Isn't that basically network address translation? I guess it depends on your make of router, I had to go under NAT to set up port forwarding.

[Megaf]

so I set up two NATs

Port forwards*

Two NAT port forwarding rules.

[sfan5]

so I set up two NATs

Port forwards*

Isn't that basically network address translation? I guess it depends on your make of router, I had to go under NAT to set up port forwarding.

Network Address Translation is an activity/technique, it has no plural (if you use it like this).

[mauvebic]

lol okay so he had the right term, just the wrong grammar :p