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!

  • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • operator@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.com
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        1 year ago

        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?