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!
Yeah you can just leave it, delete the A record if you want to.
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 answerWhich 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=traefikMy 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: 100Any ideas what’s going wrong? I’m unclear on why the domain is still routing to Cloudflare.
It sounds like your client isn’t using PiHole for DNS, do you see the DNS lookup come through the pihole logs?
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?
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
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?
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.
Figured it out. It’s a weird setting on Netgear routers whereby you have to also update the MAC address. All been working well for the last few hours and getting queries running through Pi-hole.
I’ve also got my Homepage container setup at http://home.mydomain.com and configured Traefik a little further so it’s now accessible from http://traefik.mydomain.com (no port).
For the past few hours I’ve been struggling with getting Pi-hole behind Traefik and accessible using http://pihole.mydomain.com. Only works if I stick /admin on the end, which defeats the object of using a subdomain. Found a forum post suggesting to use Traefik’s addPrefix after declaring the Host as pihole.mydomain.com, which works great for accessing the login screen, but when you enter the password it just loops back to the login screen.
Also tried a few other things that ultimately broke the Pi-hole container and took out my entire connection, as everything is dependent on Pi-hole for DNS! So need to figure out some kind of resiliency/backup for that (my router is using the NAS IP as it’s primary and only DNS server).
So, some progress. I’ve set Pi-hope back to IP:port and I’m gonna focus on getting other containers behind Traefik and leave Pi-hole till last. Then and only then will I look at SSL certificates (unless it’s advised to do it earlier?)
Any pointers on any of the above would be appreciated! And thanks again for getting me this far.
Update from this morning.
So far I’ve got the Traefik dashboard and my Homepage container using subdomains. Pi-hole is still an issue that I need to figure out.
I’ve decided to start on the SSL certificates and am following a couple of guides. Once I have those in place, I’ll start moving more containers behind subdomains.
I might have to expose my NAS IP to the internet and link it via Cloudflare, because I use an ExpressVPN on my Mac at all times, and when it’s turned on I can’t access ***any ***of my subdomains - this is obviously because ExpressVPN use their own DNS entries and don’t use the ones I’ve set. That will probably prevent me from using Vaultwarden (which is the whole purpose for all of this in the first place) because if I’m on the VPN I won’t be able to access the Vaultwarden container.
Unless anyone knows of a workaround for that?
Next steps: