this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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So everyone is talking about cloudflare tunnels and I decided to give it a shot.

However, I find the learning curve quite hard and would really appreciate a short introduction into how they work and how do I set them up…

In my current infrastructure I am running a reverse proxy with SSL and Authentik, but nothing is exposed outside. I access my network via a VPN but would like to try out and consider CF. Might be easier for the family.

How does authentication work? Is it really a secure way to expose internal services?

Thanks!

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[–] operator@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Thanks! How do you handle that with internal DNS? I suppose you’d need to setup the exact same proxies on the internal and external server, and local DNS handles which one my domain it’s being resolved to?

[–] ablackcatstail@lemmy.goblackcat.com 1 points 2 years ago (9 children)

Right now the internal DNS I use has a TLD of .lan but that's pretty much for my personal convenience. I access my websites by their FQDN internally with no issue. So I am not sure what your tring to achieve. Mind elaborating?

[–] operator@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Of course! So in order to get maximum speed on your services, you wanna use a direct internal route when you're inside your net. My understanding is, that when using an external cloud VPS with a proxy, local clients go through unnecessary routing..

Local request --out--> external VPS (proxy) --request data from internal--> receive data on external proxy --send back--> local client

So what I am saying, all requests are unnecessarily routed through the external VPS. So one would have to create an exact duplicate reverse proxy internally to avoid leaving the net. When accessing domain.com, the internal DNS returns the local proxy IP, when outside you receive the cloud VPS IP.

Or am I missing something?

Thank you for taking the time!

I have not converted my home network to use split-brain yet and that's because I only just recently got Let's Encrypt to work with the DNS-01 challenge which verifies domain ownership via a TXT record. Now that the DNS-01 challenge works perfectly, I can use split-brain DNS to resolve my example.com requests to internal IP addresses. What I am currently doing is as follows and it is inefficient and ugly!

Local request ---> Internet --> VPS Proxy --> WireGuard tunnel --> Local Server --> WireGuard tunnel -> VPS Proxy -> Internet --> Local origin

Now that I have Let's Encrypt working using the DNS-01 challenge, there will be significantly less latency. It should look something like this:

Local request --> Local DNS Server --> Local Server --> Local request
                                         |
                                         --> Local Server --> WireGuard Tunnel --> Internet

I hope this is helpful! This will reduce the amount of locally generated traffic that must transit the VPN tunnel bi-directionally.

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