I found an interesting article on Reddit about a home lab user using the home/free tier of Cloudflare for their network.

On top of the usual DDOS stuff, they handle SSL and proxying to HTTP/HTTPS
for your facing services, provide DNS for your domain, allow access to their CDN, and you get to hide your home IP in the process.

There's a lot of analytics, I'm just starting to play with that now.

The original poster is using pfsense to talk to Cloudflare's API, it sounds like you could do some interesting things with it.

Definitely worth checking into, I'd started setting up a reverse proxy on my network, mostly to handle LetsEncrypt renewals, but this would render that moot as well as add some other features.


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The original poster is using pfsense to talk to Cloudflare's API, it sound like you could do some interesting things with it.

I've got a small container which checks every 5 minutes if my home IP has changed and calls Cloudflare's API to update the wildcard A record for my domain.

I'm hosting a half dozen services running behind nginx-ingress and let's encrypt cert issuer on a kubernetes cluster. The cluster is running small RancherOS VMs on Proxmox.

With the wildcard, I just spin up a new service and have a valid certificate issued automatically and be in business. The only downside is that Cloudflare can't proxy wildcard records so I lose the proxy benefit though.

Lachlan

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lynx769 wrote:

The original poster is using pfsense to talk to Cloudflare's API, it sound
like you could do some interesting things with it.

I've got a small container which checks every 5 minutes if my home IP has changed and calls Cloudflare's API to update the wildcard A record for my domain.

I have nsupdate running on my router which runs openwrt. It will automatically update my DNS without having to check every so often. It's nice and quick.

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Re: Cloudflare
By: poindexter FORTRAN to All on Wed Apr 21 2021 07:26 am

I found an interesting article on Reddit about a home lab user using the home/free tier of Cloudflare for their network.

On top of the usual DDOS stuff, they handle SSL and proxying to HTTP/HTTPS for your facing services, provide DNS for your domain, allow access to their CDN, and you get to hide your home IP in the process.

There's a lot of analytics, I'm just starting to play with that now.

The original poster is using pfsense to talk to Cloudflare's API, it sounds like you could do some interesting things with it.

Definitely worth checking into, I'd started setting up a reverse proxy on my network, mostly to handle LetsEncrypt renewals, but this would render that moot as well as add some other features.

... The neuroanatomy of fear and faith share common afferent pathways.

Cloudflare is a Google-class threat to privacy and freedom of the Internet.

Their SSL management is very meh if you use them only as an SSL accelerator. They break the asumption that the SSL/TLS connection is performed to the website's hosting location. If you use them as an accelerator they get to see all the supposedly encrypted traffic and your users won't know it unless they pay a lot of attention.

Anti-DDOS is nice. It is too bad that in order to have your own DDOS protection nowadays you need the infrastructure to route DOS connections to /dev/null, which is kind fo expensive.

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lynx769 wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

With the wildcard, I just spin up a new service and have a valid certificate issued automatically and be in business. The only downside
is that Cloudflare can't proxy wildcard records so I lose the proxy benefit though.

I'm new to the cert game. I assumed that LetsEncrypt couldn't do wildcards.
If they did, I could replace all of the standalone LE instances with the reverse proxy server I want to build. But, then I wouldn't need the proxy server, as it's going to be there to allow my internal hosts to renew their
LE certificates. :)

What are you using as a reverse proxy? I am planning on using nginx, only because I've recently used it at work to proxy some servers behind a single IP.


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Nelgin wrote to lynx769 <=-

I have nsupdate running on my router which runs openwrt. It will automatically update my DNS without having to check every so often.
It's nice and quick.

I've got dynamic DNS, and I use a static A address on my provider for my
base host name, then CNAME everything off of it. I haven't had my IP address change unless I hard reset my router.


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I'm new to the cert game. I assumed that LetsEncrypt couldn't do wildcards If they did, I could replace all of the standalone LE instances with the reverse proxy server I want to build. But, then I wouldn't need the proxy server, as it's going to be there to allow my internal hosts to renew thei LE certificates. :)

I should clarify that I'm referring to wilcard DNS records, not wilcard
certs. However, you can do wilcard certs with DNS challenge. There is a certbot cloudflare dns plugin that you might want to check out, but I haven't used it.

What I do instead is use an A record for the root domain pointing to my external IP. Then a * CNAME which resolves to the root domain. I am using
the nginx-ingress for kubernetes with letencrypt cluster issues.

What that means is that when I deploy an app (e.g. my blog) on the cluster, I can specify the hostname in the manifest that I want the app to respond to and it will resolve to my external IP. The ports are forwarded to the node
running nginx as reverse proxy which then routes requests internally to the correct node and pod. The letsencrypt issuer takes care of setting up the
HTTP letsencrypt challenge and renews certificates automatically.

It all takes less than 5 minutes to deploy a new app or scale it up to more nodes. My blog goes into more details about my set up if you are interested. I started it as a way to document what doing as I was learning about "cloud native" technologies and gitops.

Lachlan

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lynx769 wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

more nodes. My blog goes into more details about my set up if you are interested. I started it as a way to document what doing as I was
learning about "cloud native" technologies and gitops.

What's your blog's address? I'd love to read it.


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What's your blog's address? I'd love to read it.

https://blog.lachlanlife.net

Lachlan

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lynx769 wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

What's your blog's address? I'd love to read it.

https://blog.lachlanlife.net

Looks interesting, bookmarked for reading later. I've been playing with
nginx and letsencrypt, Ansible, and Proxmox and OpenLDAP, seems like we're doing some of the same things.




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On 4/22/2021 6:15 AM, poindexter FORTRAN wrote:

I'm new to the cert game. I assumed that LetsEncrypt couldn't do wildcards. If they did, I could replace all of the standalone LE instances with the reverse proxy server I want to build. But, then I wouldn't need the proxy server, as it's going to be there to allow my internal hosts to renew their LE certificates. :)

What are you using as a reverse proxy? I am planning on using nginx, only because I've recently used it at work to proxy some servers behind a single IP.

You can do wildcards with LE, but you need to have DNS integration.

I've mostly been using Caddy for reverse proxy and static content...
I'll use Nginx when I need more than that.
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