Centralization is bad for everyone everywhere.
That bring said… I just moved my homeserver to another city… and I plugged in the power, then I plugged in the ethernet, and that was the whole shebang.
Tunnels made it very easy. No port forwarding no dns configuration no firewall fiddling no nothing.
Why do they have to make it so so easy…
The trouble with cloudflare is that there is just one. It’s one of the best registrars out there, the only free/cheap and usable DNS host (have you seen what route53 charges per zone??). That without getting into the whole tunnels and DDoS mitigation end of things, which is nearly unique at any price point.
The problem with cloudflare is that we’re missing three other cloudflares to move to if they decide to pull evil shit.
The bigger trouble is creating a CDN has a stupidly high barrier to entry. You literally need your own data centers across the world, your own server infrastructure, the man power to manage it, etc.
You could try to host it on a cloud provider but you’d go bankrupt even quicker. Unless someone were to try to build a co-op run CDN, it’s just not gonna happen without a profit motive and a large amount of capital.
That’s true. The bizarre paradox of the centralization of edge infrastructure is real.
That said, the other edge-lords (haha) could offer similar functionality, but they chose not to.
I once realized so many of my favourite businesses were cooperatives. I started thinking of what other co-ops I could start and grow. The excitement faded once I realized it would have to not be about the money.
Car making without the tracking bullshit!
I feel like something like https://www.storj.io/ is on the path to what we would want/need?
There might be some additional requirements for a true CDN to ensure data is closer to where it’s needed and in as many regions as needed though with the right amount of bandwidth. The data gets stored all over the place, but that doesn’t mean its optimal. But they do seem to claim it’s faster on their website…
Edit: For those not wanting to click, TLDR is they use excess storage around the world and make it accessible anywhere, and safe from failures. People with excess storage can join the network if they have enough storage/bandwidth and pass some tests. Their API is S3 compatible.
I mean the optimal cdn is maximally distributed to reduce load and latency right. Unfortunatly the web was not built in a manner that supports this.
Eg if we could have a single url for the same object that could be served by any server that is part of the fediverse then the fediverse itself would be an optimal cdn.
Perhaps we should take some notes from peertube. Plus more legitimate bit torrent content on the internet as a whole is hardly a bad thing make the isp’s jobs harder for places without net neutrality.
Look up Anycast when you get a chance.
I consulted with professor gpt and it seams that it’s basicly just giving the same ip address to multiple servers meaning that any of said servers can serve as that ip.
Also it seems said ips require paying large sums of money to isps. My poiny was more that with the current mainstream internet (http websockets etc) it would require you to run a local service/proxy that can interpret a global id and route to basicly any small server with said resource. Unfortunatly i dont think its possible to build such a thing that would just work across browsers if embedded into a standard webpage.
there is just one
Well it’s cloudflare, not cloudsflare. Maybe overcasthosting, or sunblockservers…
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Why does Cloudflare get a pass on the “if it’s free, you’re the product” mantra of the self-hosting community? Honest question. They seem to provide a lot for free, so…
It’s usually free tiers of paid products
That makes sense, except Google kinda does the same thing. Everything they have is technically just a “free tier” of the Google One subscription, right? I guess I’m saying that “free tier of paid product” doesn’t automatically qualify a company as trustworthy for me. Is there something else that sets Cloudflare apart?
For me personally, it was all about balance.
15 years ago, Gmail/Inbox was a great email client, the domain was great and popular (so no need to spell it out for people) and I would “pay” by getting ads based on my emails read by a bot.
Now Gmail is a terrible email client, the best updates are ridiculous things like moving buttons around and it takes Google years to roll out. The thing loses emails, mislabels and misclassifies stuff and the rules work for a week then blow up. On top of that, google is now basically a proctologist considering how far up my ass they want to go
The balance is broken… Google now officially sucks (IMO)
In my opinion, the difference with Google is that Google is actively using your data and you’re giving them a lot of it. For Cloudflare, what do they have exactly? Depends on what services you use, but really all they get from me is the list of servers that connect to my domains. Google does that too if you use 8.8.8.8, or if you have any of their hardware that overrides router DNS settings like Chromecast and Google TV.
Quality of their products maybe? Cloudflare feels like they put a lot of effort into their product, Google not so much with how buggy everything is and how often they just abandon products they offer.
Google is an advertising company first, everything else second. Of course they shouldn’t be trusted, it’s safe to assume they’ll log and analyze the smallest piece of data
Well search and maps (and some others) have no paid tier. Even for paid products, google does quite explicitly make money from the free version through ads. And most google ads are through third party sites, so you can’t opt out of them by paying google.
Because most self hosted things are free already. It doesn’t apply to FOSS.
Do you have an alternative to cloudflare tunnels? I’d love to hear it, because I’m also not really happy about relying on them either, but tailscale only works up to an extent because not all devices can connect to it and it’s a pain in the ass to get random family members to connect to it as well.
we should definitively have a wiki (though people should use “search” too, I wonder if a wiki would help really). This “topic” comes every month. I have posted this already, here it goes again: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
That’s awesome thanks!
Thanks for sharing!
Unless you are behind CGNAT; you would have had the same plug+play experience by using your own router instead of the ISP supplied one, and using DDNS.
At least, I did.
Yes, but it does expose your own IP address and thus where you live. Tunnels don’t.
True, but the downside of cloudflare is that they are a reverse proxy and can see all your https traffic unencrypted.
Yes, but if you host a public site it might be a better option, the content is public anyway, and you won’t get doxed if you publish something controversial. It’s a trade-off, between keeping traffic private or keeping your IP private. Wireguard works best for private traffic, but you can’t host a public site with that.
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Your IP changes all the time, it doesn’t matter. The best someone can deduct from your IP is the country.
This is false. Some ISP’s change IP’s often, but some don’t and sometimes geoip lookups can be really accurate. My IP has remained the same since I moved in, and a geoip lookup results in a coordinate less than a kilometer away. It does matter.
I guess you live in a country with loads of spare IP addresses. Here in the UK they change every few days and IPs get rotated between all ISPs, so you can’t even deduct which ISP I’m using. And sometimes my IP is not even a mainland UK IP, but some weird shit from across the world, because Empire, lol.
When looking up my static ip, the location I get is the one of my ISP, not my address. Do you happen to live nearby some central infrastructure of your ISP? (If it seems otherwise, I’m not trying to debunk what you said - I’m just asking curious questions!)
Yes, it seems to be a hit or a miss. I don’t think I live near any central infrastructure or ISP, especially not this specific part of the city.
No. You are skipping DNS.
I didn’t skip it, I installed ddclient.
Cloudflare is the devil!
and using DDNS
As in, running software to update your DNS records automatically based on your current system IP. Great for dynamic IPs, or just moving location.
Not entirely. CF can protect you from DDOS of up to a few millions of calls per minute. Your home router would melt with that traffic. They also act as a firewall if you enable the proxy dns feature. They do a sanity check before forwarding the call. Also a home router cannot do this. And there’s more.
Sure, cloudflare provides other security benefits; but that’s not what OP was talking about. They just wanted/liked the plug+play aspect, which doesn’t need cloudflare.
Those ‘benefits’ are also really not necessary for the vast majority of self hosters. What are you hosting, from your home, that garners that kind of attention?
The only things I host from home are private services for myself or a very limited group; which, as far as ‘attacks’ goes, just gets the occasional script kiddy looking for exposed endpoints. Nothing that needs mitigation.
It’s almost like the big tech companies are really good at their jobs…
I prefer Tailscale Funnel for these kinds of things. NetBird and ZeroTier also work just fine if you don’t want to expose your services to the public.
Tailscale is so cool too. I’ll definitely be switching if I can ever use my own domains
You can set A DNS entries without wildcard in the configs (with head scale at least), just use their magic DNS thing that works with hostnames or just self host DNS and tell your tailnet to use that.
I looked at headscale but as far as I can tell their is no active directory or SSO integration. Which is very unfortunate.
Good news, they support OIDC! Haven’t tested it myself so your mileage may vary.
I use Cloudflare as my registrar and public DNS. And only for that. Sorry but they don’t get to peek at my network traffic.
I mean, I used to think Google Public DNS was great until I switched to 1.1.1.1…
If you like 1.1.1.1 the. You should try 9.9.9.9. Or better yet host unbound pihole if you’re up to the challenge. Best dns experience I’ve had.
If you use 9.9.9.9, you should try Mullvad DNS (with adblocking) or AdGuard Public DNS
Since we’re all throwing out DNS options, I’ll toss in NextDNS
I already use pihole, but with cloudflared as the upstream. What benefits does unbound offer besides improved security?
It’s actually better privacy since it talks directly to the root servers instead of cloudflare knowing all of your DNS traffic. Quad9 is a good alternative with better data policies
So now your ISP sees all of your queries instead of CF. (Assuming the cloudflared option is using DoH)
I’ll trust Cloudflare over Comcast/AT&T/etc. any day of the week.
It looks like Quad9 supports DoH: quad9
You can run a VPN and tunnel your outbound DNS queries over that. Heck, you could tunnel your DNS queries over TOR
Your ISP knows where you’re going anyway. They don’t need DNS for that. They see all the traffic.
You might want to study more about SNI. Your ISP knows anyway
I know plenty account SNI already, but thanks. You might want to study more yourself, since we’re being condescending.
Well, running your own DNS server will also give you eSNI. And Cloudflare still doesn’t know anything
What benefits are you having from switching?
1.1.1.1/cloudflared responds crazy fast compared to anything else i’ve used. I really just wanted off Google (and before them OpenDNS). That’s about it.
Their static website hosting is probably the best in the business. We seriously need some competition though.
I am out of the loop, what’s going in with snooping?
I use their cloudflared tunnel sometimes for accessing home hosted stuff.
Because Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy it can see everything that happens in a session.
This is also known as a man in the middle attack. But Cloudflare meds to do this in order to do it’s checks for bad actors.Now, as Cloudflare has access to the unencrypted traffic and we know that NSA is all about data vacuuming due to the Snowdn leaks we can make a tin foil hat guess whaylt goes on.
Just note, OP, that the last part of his statement is pure speculation. The first part is technically true, which can lead to that inference, but no information has been released which corroborates it. However, that does not mean it’s not possible.
This is true. Which is why I said tinfoil hat guess.
I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.
My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.
Thank you!
I have written a small blog post about how to Bypass CGNAT, and have also mentioned why you should not use Cloudflare if you are hosting for privacy.
I use cloud flare tunnel for my home server too. Are there any viable and somewhat easy alternatives?
DNS names are restricted to your tailnet’s domain name (node-name.tailnet-name.ts.net)
I guess that’s fine for some. Not a compromise I’m willing to make though.
As soon as I can use my personal domains with tailscale funnel I’ll be switching, I like tail scale a lot
Once configured, Tor Hidden Services also just work (you may need to use some fresh bridges in certain countries if ISPs block Tor there though). You don’t have to trust any specific third party in this case.
Wouldn’t that be slow?
It would. But it’s a good option when you have computationally heavy tasks and communication is relatively light.
Yes. Very slow. And only accessible from tor clients or tor2web/onion.to-like constructions. Which adds additional delay and errors.
There are things for which onion addresses are the right solution. This is not one of them.
DynDNS? I’m not 100% sure what CF Tunnel does, but from my 2 min reading it seems that DynDNS would accomplish what OP described just as well.
It might help to read it once more then 🙂
Oh, it’s way more than what any dyndns can do.
Are there browser plugins (or other solutions) to see if an site uses cloudflare before visting?
Is there a way to do reverse tunnels, or something like it, so not opening any ports at all on the network, without cloudflare?
Closest to that XP I got was generating VPN keys and distributing them to close friends, running DDNS (no-ip) on my Pi with a pivpn server and then accessing JellyFin that way.
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