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?
In effect, Cloudflare would give protection against DDoS attacks before requests would even hit your servers. That much said you can implement mitigations on the reverse proxy itself. One example would be fail2ban.
I’m sure there are additional steps that you can take. I’m not a fan of Cloudflare because their free offering has some caveats and violating these could be problematic. I have a cloud VPS with a WireGuard tunnel back to my server. I don’t have to do anything ugly like port forwarding. The cloud VPS runs NGINX as a reverse proxy. It’s a relatively simple and effective setup.
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?
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?
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.
I just decided to go ahead and implement split-brain DNS this evening and it works perfectly. What are you using for your internal DNS server? If it is Unbound, the one that I am using, I can share my config with you. After implementing this, the speed of my services when being accessed from my internal network sped up by an order of magnitude. I shoulda done this earlier. 😆
Here is a sample configuration that should work for you:
server:
interface: 127.0.0.1
interface: 192.168.1.1
do-udp: yes
do-tcp: yes
do-not-query-localhost: no
verbosity: 1
log-queries: yes
access-control: 0.0.0.0/0 refuse
access-control-view: 127.0.0.0/8 example
access-control-view: 192.168.1.0/24 example
hide-identity: yes
hide-version: yes
tcp-upstream: yes
remote-control:
control-enable: yes
control-interface: /var/run/unbound.sock
view:
name: "example"
local-zone: "example.com." inform
local-data: "example.com. IN A 192.168.1.2"
local-data: "www IN CNAME example.com."
local-data: "another.example.com. IN A 192.168.1.3"
forward-zone:
name: "."
forward-addr: 8.8.8.8
forward-addr: 8.8.4.4
What makes the split-brain DNS work is if the request for resolution comes from the localhost or from inside your network, it will first go to the view section to see if there is any pertinent local data. So if you do a query from your home network, on say, example.com, it will return your internal IP address which in this case is 192.168.1.2
Sure! Let me know how it goes. If you need to do something more complex for internal DNS records for more than just A records, then look at the unbound.conf man page for stub zones. If you need something even more flexible than stub zones, you can use Unbound as a full authoritative DNS server with auth-zones. As far as I know auth-zones can even do zone transfers AXFR style which is cool!
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In effect, Cloudflare would give protection against DDoS attacks before requests would even hit your servers. That much said you can implement mitigations on the reverse proxy itself. One example would be fail2ban.
I’m sure there are additional steps that you can take. I’m not a fan of Cloudflare because their free offering has some caveats and violating these could be problematic. I have a cloud VPS with a WireGuard tunnel back to my server. I don’t have to do anything ugly like port forwarding. The cloud VPS runs NGINX as a reverse proxy. It’s a relatively simple and effective setup.
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?
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?
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 clientSo 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 just decided to go ahead and implement split-brain DNS this evening and it works perfectly. What are you using for your internal DNS server? If it is Unbound, the one that I am using, I can share my config with you. After implementing this, the speed of my services when being accessed from my internal network sped up by an order of magnitude. I shoulda done this earlier. 😆
That be amazing! I am currently not using anything (took down my homelab a while back) and planning on completely starting over fresh now.
I am most likely going with unbound! So if you could, that be great!
Here is a sample configuration that should work for you:
What makes the split-brain DNS work is if the request for resolution comes from the localhost or from inside your network, it will first go to the
viewsection to see if there is any pertinent local data. So if you do a query from your home network, on say,example.com, it will return your internal IP address which in this case is192.168.1.2Appreciate it!
Sure! Let me know how it goes. If you need to do something more complex for internal DNS records for more than just A records, then look at the unbound.conf man page for stub zones. If you need something even more flexible than stub zones, you can use Unbound as a full authoritative DNS server with auth-zones. As far as I know auth-zones can even do zone transfers AXFR style which is cool!