All right, I had some spare time today, so I went and installed this thing.

My setup is a bit more complex than the minimum necessary, but that’s because I’m using an already existing Postgres database instead of installing a new one on my computer. It is as follows: Postgres running on a mini PC on my local network (192.168.2.199:5432), a browser running on my main computer, and a Debian VM for DBgate with two NICs - one is the default NAT interface (I’m too lazy to configure proper bridging / routing) and the second is a virtual bridge, testbr. On testbr, the host OS is 192.168.123.1/24, and the guest is 192.168.123.2/24.

I installed DBgate on the VM using NPM - npm install -g dbgate-serve, as specified in the documentation. Then I ran it using simply dbgate-serve, then connected to it from a browser running on my host OS as http://192.168.123.2:3000/. That works fine.

Then I added my Postgres DB through the web interface (to be verbose, I entered 192.168.2.199 as the IP address), created a table and inserted some dummy data. Then I wanted to do the next step, which is to block outgoing connections to port 5432 from the VM, but I noticed something very strange, given that DBgate obviously doesn’t use the server as a backend to do the actual DB connection: this was in the server log

{"pid":7012,"caller":"databaseConnections","conid":"24d95082-ca6a-4dac-aa28-f3121bfc508d","database":"dbgate","sql":"INSERT INTO \"public\".\"dbgate_test\" (\"text\") VALUES ('haha');\nINSERT INTO \"public\".\"dbgate_test\" (\"text\") VALUES ('hehe');\n","level":30,"msg":"Processing script","time":1744395411096}

But it would be ridiculous to even suggest that the connection is relayed through the server, so it is probably some kind of telemetry. Makes sense.

Anyway, I went ahead and added the rules on the VM nft add table ip filter, nft 'add chain ip filter output { type filter hook output priority 0; tcp dport 5432 drop; }', and you wouldn’t believe what happened next… The DBgate tab can no longer load data from the database. I can reload DBgate itself without any issues, and I can connect to the database from the same computer using psql and DataGrip just fine, but for some reason it seems to be affected by the fact that its server (which is only serving the HTML/JS files and doing nothing else, as you said) cannot connect to Postgres.

Weird how that works, huh?

Node.js is a web server. It doesn’t run in a browser, therefore doesn’t deal with the browser sandbox. That should answer your first dig.

For the second part, WebRTC is a standard that allows two WebRTC peers to communicate. You can’t use WebRTC to open an arbitrary TCP or UDP stream to for example a database, unless said database decides to implement a WebRTC peer support.

If you’re unfamiliar with all of this, that’s your job to get educated. This is how browser-based JS software works.

The browser version cannot connect to Postgres without a server-side part, for rather obvious reasons - you can’t just make arbitrary network connections from the browser. Electron build is of course different, as that doesn’t have to deal with the browser sandbox.

By the way, here’s a similar issue documented in Outerbase’s repo:

Outerbase Studio Desktop is a lightweight Electron wrapper for the Outerbase Studio web version. It enables support for drivers that aren’t feasible in a browser environment, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Not gonna lie, telling people how they need to get educated on stuff you don’t understand ticks me off.

Potentially the same thing, assuming PCIe 2 x1 provides enough bandwidth.

The thing that’s going to be locked behind the subscription is your ability to watch those files on your NAS through Plex when you’re not in the same network as the Plex server. That’s streaming.

If you only use Plex while at home, you will indeed be unaffected

Only true if you don’t know what you’re doing. The only reason any network is safe at all is NAT and Firewalls that come with it.

I don’t have to worry about devices on a local network in as far as firewalls go, I can expose anything I want, in fact I delete iptables at first sight on any new distro install or VM, so long as none of it is port forwarded and everything is behind NAT it’s all okay. My network is my castle. Thanks technology! Thanks smart people for figuring this out!

NAT is not a security mechanism. If you set up a NAT with an otherwise permissive firewall, your router will happily forward any incoming packets destined for RFC 1918 addresses inside, no questions asked. I use this for a “lab” network that I sometimes want accessible from the bigger LAN - the lab router doesn’t have any rules for dropping incoming packets (only blocks some outgoing traffic), and all I have to do on the main router to get this working is to set a static route to the internal lab network through the lab router’s “external” IP.

And yes, practically it’s a security nightmare to have any IP of any computer accessible from the internet. If you go around configuring firewalls forever you might get it right but oh boy one mistake and you’re done for. Instead, consider NAT, the solution to all problems. I’m writing this behind quadruple NAT rn and it’s honestly fairly easy to manage, I’ve been too lazy to change it, not that I’d advise anything more than 1 necessarily.

accept established, related; drop incoming. That’s all you need to get the same security as a NAT with a proper firewall. Outgoing connections will get marked and have return traffic allowed, everything incoming without related outgoing traffic gets dropped. Want to “port forward”? Add a rule that allows incoming traffic to a specific IP/port/protocol triplet. Done. Don’t know how to make sure a client stays reachable on a specific address? Give it that specific IP address in addition to the one it autogenerates. This was always possible with IPv4, too, it’s just that the tiny address space made it impractical to use.

How do you get the equivalent of NAT punchthrough (which is unreliable with many NAT implementations) when you want to do a VoIP call without having to bounce all the data through a central server? Simple, you can just tell both clients the other one’s IP and port, have them spam each other for a tiny while with messages and eventually a message gets through both firewalls. It is very similar to NAT punchthrough, except you don’t have to guess how the NATs work and it’ll reliably connect.

Yikes! That’s a lot to type to hammer in a nail that sticks out (Android). Thanks but no thanks. I’ll find some way to cripple mDNS on the non-compliant device instead.

Not sure why you’d regularly need to type out the whole thing. Also not sure why you picked .local when .lan is also incorrectly used for this purpose and is shorter (and isn’t yet assigned to any conflicting technology)

So are you saying you run some sort of mDNS server(not sure what the word would be there)/provider? Why? How?

The point of mDNS is that devices auto discover each other on a network without a central authority. The word multicast in multicast DNS is the key. And the reason I use it is because… it just works. There’s no need to configure it, it works like this by default on pretty much every OS. Set the hostname and you’re done, .local now works. You can even bridge it across networks with a mDNS repeater available on many routers.

Given the ambiguity of certificates everywhere, malicious devices on the local network posing as a different server are not an issue (and it’s not like they couldn’t hijack the IP address in any flat network anyway).

Well don’t build your network around unassigned TLDs.

Also NAT does literally nothing other than being a massive PITA, so… yeah, I don’t think there’s much I can agree with in your rant.

Like, oh no, fully functional point to point connectivity across the internet, how terrible

Edit: .home.arpa is actually designated as local TLD, and is what I use for a crappy old tablet that doesn’t support mDNS