Background If you have read my previous posts, I actively deploy and maintain multiple services for personal use, running from my home, accessible securely from the internet. I use docker-compose to keep all the 40+ services running smoothly. It works fine but is not a perfect way. If one of the containers goes down and becomes unhealthy, I would not know until I tried to access the service, but it was not....
I have written before about how I have used Tailscale, a magical tool to set up Wireguard tunnels to create an overlay network called Tailnets. I have also written about how I host all of my services to be publically accessible using Cloudflare Tunnels (fka Argo Tunnels). But I recently discovered that the ~20MiB binary of cloudflared can do a lot more than just run tunnels. Here is how I used most of the newly discovered features....
If you have read through the previous articles, I have a setup where applications are securely accessible to me from anywhere. That is all well and good until something breaks, and I have to fix it. No big deal when I am home, but how would I do that if what I am trying to fix is the one that helps me access it remotely? Enter Tailscale , a point-to-point mesh VPN topology private LAN overlay over the internet....
In the last part of this series, we saw what I had set up for self-hosted applications. Now let me show how I got all these on the internet. For this, the last section is a good background. Let us look at some of the hurdles I had. I have two ISPs, and neither of them provides a static IP. Moreover, one of the ISPs does not even assign a public IP, placing me behind a CGNAT ....
Before moving to the next part, I thought it was relevant to have a background on what network architecture was backing all of this. I was never the person to take what an ISP would sell as a useless excuse of a modem/router, but I was still using a stock TP-Link router with reasonably good wireless and gigabit networking support. What I now have are two ISPs, both providing FTTH (fiber to the home)....