I think the general consensus for homelabbers is a mesh network -- Tailscale and Netbird are the two most popular options
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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VPN is the way to go if you're not sharing it with a bunch of people
Radicale is the GOAT and supports authentication. Or you can just run it on a LAN behind a firewall.
Unless you live a very dynamic lifestyle that requires your calendar to be 24/7 synced, you can just use whatever server software you like, make it listen in LAN only, and have your devices sync when they're at home.
DecSyncCC and Syncthing is another option.
I run nextcloud on my machine. If there's a crack, there would be one in their hosted instance as well. There's nothing really I can do about security of it.
I do not expose Nextcloud to the internet. I use dnsmasq to give LAN clients the private IP. If I need to access NC from elsewhere, there's VPN for that.
Related question, what CalDAV server are you using? Been looking for something lightweight
mTLS with a reverse proxy!
This is the first time I’ve heard of mTLS. Sounds interesting, any tutorial recs?
Not any in particular but mTLS is essentially just a reverse proxy (like nginx) asking a client for a certificate to be able to access the service behind it.
There are quite a few guides out there, so choose one for your reverse proxy of choice!
So it's the good old client certificate authentication?
yep
In my opinion it's the best solution because there's a really low attack surface plus it makes it easy to control which device has access to which services.
What caldav clients supports that?
I’d recommend the Tailscale style approach. MTLS is a pain imo without infrastructure and especially on the app layers
Tailscale is simpler but when you're accessing from devices behind VPNs like I do mTLS is a lifesaver.
I use DAVx⁵ for caldav (supports mTLS)
I find mTLS cool too :P
In terms of being a pain it's not that bad with nginx in my opinion. I can just build my own certificate for each service I expose or you use a common one, giving read only access to the key for my nginx containers and in two lines in the .conf it's sorted.
If you want sync to your phone, just set up a VPN. Now your phone and mobile computer can always access your services. I use SoGO, it has calendar hosting, authenticated sync which you can use with davx on android and the web interface is basic but usable. You can also enable mail, tasks and contact sync all in one.
Who do you want to have access to said calendar?
Just myself, but I would like to keep it synced between my phone and my laptop while also keeping a backup.
Then you should really look into setting up a personal VPN. After that what you use to do calendar becomes irrelevant in terms of access.
Could you set up a Cloudflare tunnel and make sure the security rules are tight enough to keep others out?