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…
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.
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.
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.
No. You are skipping DNS.
I didn’t skip it, I installed ddclient.
Cloudflare is the devil!
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.