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

    do I simply setup local DNS records in something like Pi-hole, to point mydomain.com to the internal IP or my NAS? Kind of like a network-wide equivalent of modding the /etc/hosts file on my machine?

    Yep exactly!

    Perhaps a(nother) silly question but, what’s to stop me doing that now with a completely random domain name?

    Nothing, it’s local to your network only so it only affects you. You could set google.com to return whatever IP you want for example, but it would prevent you from actually accessing google.

    If I’ve understood correctly, then, I don’t need Cloudflare at all in my setup if there’s no external access? Nothing to proxy, nothing to protect?

    The only thing you need Cloudflare (or another DNS-01 supported service) for, is getting letsencrypt SSL certificates. Since it uses automatically generated public DNS records on your domain name to verify that you own it.

    Can that be done through Traefik rather than Cloudflare? Even if the domain isn’t external?

    Yep it’s done through Traefik either way, their docs should have a section on SSL with cloudflare IIRC.

    • schmurnanOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Absolute superstar, thanks for your help so far. I’ll make a start on some of this tomorrow and see how far I get — either with Traefik or NPM.

      Do I need to do anything with the domain itself on Cloudflare at the moment? Or do I just leave it with its current A record pointing at an IP address (it was done as part of the setup in Cloudflare so I have no idea what that IP address is).

      Obviously that domain in reality will just sit there doing nothing.

        • schmurnanOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          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
      - 443:443
    expose:
      - 8080
    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
      - traefik.http.routers.traefik.entrypoints=traefik

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

          global:
  sendAnonymousUsage: false

entryPoints:
  web:
    address: ":80"
  traefik:
    address: "8080"

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

            It sounds like your client isn’t using PiHole for DNS, do you see the DNS lookup come through the pihole logs?

            • schmurnanOPEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              Actually, no I don’t see anything coming through.

              So the IP address of my router is 192.168.1.1, IP of my NAS is 192.168.1.116.

              Checked the DNS on my Mac and it’s 192.168.1.1. Checked the DNS on my NAS and it’s 192.168.1.1. I changed the DNS in my router to 192.168.1.116.

              Have I missed a step somewhere?

              • @darelikEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                I think the pihole container needs to be on the host network or macvlan?

                • schmurnanOPEnglish
                  1•1 year ago

                  I’ve just added in a macvlan network to my Pi-hole compose as well, not sure if it’s making any difference or not.

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

                It sounds like you haven’t updated your routers DHCP server to hand out the Pihole IP to clients. You can manually set the DNS server to the Pihole IP on your Mac for testing too.

                The flow should be: Clients > Pihole > Router > Public DNS

                Or you can skip the router: Clients > Pihole > Public DNS

                • schmurnanOPEnglish
                  1•1 year ago

                  I wasn’t planning on using Pi-hole for DHCP - I have a LOT of reserved addresses on my network and I don’t fancy having to move them all over. My hope had been to use Pi-hole for DNS but keep the DHCP reservation with the router.

                  I’ve manually updated the DNS on my Mac to 192.168.1.116 and I can now access the Traefik dashboard via http://traefik.mydomain.com:8080 (so, getting there). So some kind of issue with the DNS on my router I think - caching maybe?

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

                    Yeah that’s fine, you just need to change the DHCP settings on your router so it gives the Pihole IP for DNS. It’s possible some routers don’t allow that though.