I’m sure I’m massively overthinking this, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a domain name that I bought through NameCheap and I’ve pointed it to Cloudflare (i.e. updated the name servers). I have a Synology NAS on which I run Docker and a few containers. Up until now I’ve done this using IP addresses and ports to access everything (I have a Homepage container running and just link to everything from there).

But I want to setup SSL and start running Vaultwarden, hence purchasing a domain name to make it all easier.

I tried creating an A record in Cloudflare to point to the internal IP of my NAS (and obviously, this couldn’t be orange-clouded through CF because it’s internal to my LAN). I’m very reluctant to point the A record to the external IP of my NAS (which, for added headache is dynamic, so I’d need to get some kind of DDNS) because I don’t want to expose everything on my NAS to the Internet. In actual fact, I’m not precious about accessing any of this stuff over the internet - if I need remote access I have a Tailscale container running that I can connect to (more on that later in the post). The domain name was purely for ease of setting up SSL and Vaultwarden.

So I guess my questions are:

  • What is the best way to go about this - do I create a DDNS on the NAS and point that external IP address to my domain in Cloudflare, then use Traefik to just expose the containers I want to have access to using subdomains?
  • If so, then how do I know that all other ports aren’t accessible (I assume because I’m only going to expose ports 80 and 443 in Traefik?)
  • What do other people see (i.e. outside my network) if they go to my domain? How do I ensure they can’t access my NAS and see some kind of page?
  • Is there a benefit to using Cloudflare?
  • How would Pi-hole and local DNS fit into this? I guess I could point my router at Pi-hole for DNS and create my A records on Pi-hole for all my subdomains - but what do I need to setup initially in Cloudflare?
  • I also have a RPi that has a (very basic) website on it - how do I setup an A record to have Cloudflare point a sub-domain to the Pi’s IP address?
  • Going back to the Tailscale thing - is it possible to point the domain to the IP address of the Tailscale container, so that the domain is only accessible when I switch on the Tailscale VPN? Is this a good idea/bad idea? Is there a better way to do it?

I’m sure these are all noob-type questions, but for the past 6-7 years I’ve purely used this internally using IP:port combinations, so never had to worry about domain names and external exposure, etc.

Many thanks in advance!

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    You’re on the right track. I’m on mobile so will be brief, edit from a laptop in a while.

    You can use subdomains, which is my preferred way if making services work with traefik, but you could also look for, say, example.com/potato to get to the potato service; this may work better with DDNS.

    Edit: each subdomain needs to be updated, you might be able to get away with making them all a CNAME that points at the DDNS.

    You’re correct in your assessment that you only expose 80 and 443 for the Traefik container and access everything else through that. Also only use 80 to redirect to 443.

    Don’t expose the NAS directly to the web, instrad look at port forwarding on your router, it should be able to forward requests received on only 80 and 443 to the NAS while still blocking everything else.

    My only complaint about Synology stuff is that I couldn’t get Traefik in swarm mode going!

    Any questions reach out.

    Edit2: consider looking at a cheap VPS or a static IP to eliminate the requirement to expose your NAS directly to the web. Alternately run your internal DNS for stuff (including SSL certs from LetsEncrypt) and VPN in (I use Wireguard) when you want to access it.

    • schmurnanOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thanks. Yep, subdomains was what I’d planned on: traefik.mydomain.com to access the Traefik dashboard; home.mydomain.com to access the Homepage container. I was planning on spinning up an Authelia container as well to provide 2FA for the services I want protecting. I guess it’d also be nice to have some kind of landing page for traffic coming directly to www.mydomain.com or mydomain.com as well.

      Ideally I don’t want to port forward, so would I need to rely on Traefik to redirect the traffic from port 80 to port 443, and then proxy from port 443 to the required container? How do I therefore stop traffic from hitting the DSM admin on ports 5000/5001 for example?

      I need to figure out a starting point to get traffic from my domain into my NAS (safely) then start spinning up containers and have Traefik route them appropriately, then I can look at Pi-hole/local DNS and Tailscale. And then I guess SSL.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        Ideally I don’t want to port forward, so would I need to rely on Traefik to redirect the traffic from port 80 to port 443, and then proxy from port 443 to the required container? How do I therefore stop traffic from hitting the DSM admin on ports 5000/5001 for example?

        That’s not quite how it works - the port forwarding is on your internet gateway to allow traffic on those ports to a specific host internal to your network. That’s your only option if you want these services to be available on the wider web.

        My recommendation around using 80 to redirect to 443 is because in 2023 there’s no reason for that traffic to be unencrypted - just listen on 80 and say “Hey, go to https://example.com” instead.

        If you don’t care about that you can do internal only DNS + VPN into the network and still get the benefits of free SSL certificates via the LetsEncrypt DNS01 challenge.

        • schmurnanOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Thanks, and yeah sorry, what I meant was to listen on both ports 80 and 443 and have a redirect in Traefik from 80 to 443 - I don’t plan on having anything directly accessible over port 80.

          As per another post, I’ve hit a stumbling block:

          OK so made a start with this. Spun up a Pi-hole container, added mydomain.com as an A record in Local DNS, and created a CNAME for traefik.mydomain.com to point to mydomain.com.

          In Cloudflare, I removed the mydomain.com A record and the www CNAME record.

          Doing an nslookup on mydomain.com I get

          Non-authoritative answer:
*** Can't find mydomain.com: No answer

          Which I guess is to be expected.

          However, when I then navigate to http://traefik.mydomain.com in my browser, I’m met with a Cloudflare error page: https://imgur.com/XhKOywo.

          Below is the docker-compose of my traefik container:

          traefik:
    container_name: traefik
    image: traefik:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - medianet
    ports:
      - 80:80
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
      - /volume1/docker/traefik:/etc/traefik
      - /volume1/docker/traefik/access.log:/logs/access.log
      - /volume1/docker/traefik/traefik.log:/logs/traefik.log
      - /volume1/docker/traefik/acme/acme.json:/acme.json
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/London
    labels:
      - traefik.enable=true
      - traefik.http.routers.traefik.rule=Host(`$TRAEFIK_DASHBOARD_HOST`) && (PathPrefix(`/api`) || PathPrefix(`/dashboard`))
      - traefik.http.routers.traefik.service=api@internal

          My traefik.yml is also nice and basic at this point:

          global:
  sendAnonymousUsage: false

entryPoints:
  web:
    address: ":80"

api:
  dashboard: true
  insecure: true

providers:
  docker:
    endpoint: "unix:///var/run/docker.sock"
    watch: true
    exposedByDefault: false

log:
  filePath: traefik.log
  level: DEBUG

accessLog:
  filePath: access.log
  bufferingSize: 100

          Any ideas what’s going wrong? I’m unclear on why the domain is still routing to Cloudflare.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            Sorry about the delay.

            Probably TTL to be honest, it can take a long time for DNS changes to propagate. You’d typically set the TTL really low, wait a while, then change the value, then set the TTL back.

            • schmurnanOPEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              No problem, I appreciate the help!

              So I’ve made a fair bit of progress now - I’ve managed to get all my containers working behind the Traefik reverse proxy with SSL. I’ve also deployed a Cloudflare DDNS container in Docker and have linked the external IP address of my Synology NAS to Cloudflare. I haven’t port forwarded 80 and 443, though, so it’s not accessible over the internet. So I’ve added local DNS into Pi-hole so I can access all the containers using subdomains.

              I’ve also deployed an Authelia container and have started running through my containers adding 2FA in front of them all.

              I should probably point out at this juncture, that if I encounter any errors, the HTTP 404 page that I get is a Cloudflare one - I assume that’s expected behaviour?

              So, the final three bits I’m struggling with now are:

              • Pi-hole behind the reverse proxy
              • Portainer behind the reverse proxy
              • Accessing Vaultwarden over the internet (because as soon as I leave my house, if the vault hasn’t synced then I don’t have access to all my passwords) - unless anybody has a better suggestion?

              Portainer - I have no idea how I do it, because I use it to manage my containers, so don’t have the config for Portainer in Portainer (obviously). So if I screw up the config, how am I getting back in to Portainer to fix it?

              And the far more troubling one is Pi-hole. I just cannot get that thing working behind the reverse proxy.

              I’ve followed a few different guides (though none of them are recent), and the below is the latest docker-compose I have. It will bring up the login page, but when I login it keeps returning me back to the login page - it won’t go to the main admin page.

              version: "3.7"

services:
  pihole:
    container_name: pihole
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - medianet
      - npm_network
    ports:
      - 8008:80
      - 53:53/tcp
      - 53:53/udp
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/London
      - WEBPASSWORD=xxxxxxxxxx
      - FTLCONF_LOCAL_IPV4=192.168.1.116
      - WEBTHEME=default-auto
      - DNSMASQ_LISTENING=ALL
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=pihole.mydomain.com
    volumes:
      - /path/to/pihole:/etc/pihole
      - /path/to/pihole/dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    labels:
      - traefik.enable=true
      - traefik.http.routers.pihole.entrypoints=http
      - traefik.http.routers.pihole.rule=Host(`pihole.mydomain.com`)
      - traefik.http.middlewares.pihole-https-redirect.redirectscheme.scheme=https
      - traefik.http.routers.pihole.middlewares=pihole-https-redirect
      - traefik.http.middlewares.pihole-addprefix.addprefix.prefix=/admin
      - traefik.http.routers.pihole.middlewares=pihole-addprefix
      - traefik.http.routers.pihole-secure.entrypoints=https
      - traefik.http.routers.pihole-secure.rule=Host(`pihole.mydomain.com`)
      - traefik.http.routers.pihole-secure.tls=true
      - traefik.http.routers.pihole-secure.service=pihole
      - traefik.http.services.pihole.loadbalancer.server.port=80

networks:
  medianet:
    external: true
  npm_network:
    external: true