0: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/application...
One of the most useful things for my case is the access control. Basically, I want my services to be accessible from anywhere, but only by me. This allows me set up authentication before the requests even hit my server.
If you want your services to be world accessible, that works well, too. They even have an agent that initiates the connection from the server, so it works well behind ISP CG-NAT, dynamic IPs, etc, and you don't have to mess around with incoming connection filtering.
Is the cloudflared smart enough to route connections locally? Hm, not sure how that would work.
I'm sitting at home, but accessing my nextcloud through the cloud flare. Is there a way to get it to talk to nextcloud locally or is it going through the net?
Do you mean have cloudflared expose your local server locally? No. It's just a reverse proxy of sorts between cloudflare's network and your local server.
What you want can be achieved with local DNS, so that nc.tra3.com resolves to <cloudflare-ip> from outside and to 192.168.1.2 from inside. But you should probably also have a local certificate for this to be fully transparent.
It is my ‘job to be done’, and it does it well.
That is the problem these things solve.
For me, if I have the browser already open, it's control-L type a few characters enter to get to most of my usual destinations.
Personally I get a nice feeling of accomplishment from looking at a dashboard with all the services I've set up. It's maybe not super useful but it's nice.
It's true that in my case, one of the first things I did was set up DNS. My lab also has a public domain name that I manage through Cloudflare, which also gives me easy SSL [0] for my services.
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[0] "easy" as in I don't have to have an open port for Let's Encrypt. And I'm also uncomfortable with giving full DNS access to every service, because I haven't yet found a registrar with sane access control for zone management.
At one point I set up an internal Smallstep CA [0], which kinda worked but was pretty fragile, so I abandoned it.
I didn't know about ACME-DNS. It looks interesting, but for the time being tunneling everything through Cloudflared works well enough for my needs.
There isn't much excuse for that though. In a homelab setting in particular I think you should just run your own DNS and CA with your own domain. The Name Constraints option is handy there for containing scope (also useful for restricting the scope of any other internal CAs a business might ask you to run for example via cross signing).
I'm guessing if you are self-hosting these things they are used often enough that they would be in the top of your autocomplete?
But for a homelab whatever one wants ultimately is fine, whole point is to experiment after all!
One commenter mentioned sharing some apps with other people, so browser bookmarks may not be the best solution.
I've actually been looking into self-hosted bookmark managers yesterday, some of which can handle sharing. These may work.
My use case is somewhat similar, in that I sometimes use PCs different from my main one, and they also use different browsers. But I haven't found anything that I felt like taking for a spin.
I can share one homepage to all of them, and only update one place if there are changes.
Dashy also has status lights for services, which isn't a replacement for real monitoring, but has been useful.
I do run a (distributed!) homelab, but it's not clear to me what problem these dashboards solve.
I can split the things I run on my homelab in two categories: either "infrastructure", things like VPNs, routing, DB, etc, or "actual apps", like a wiki and whatnot.
For the first category, I basically don't "do" anything to them once they're set up.
For the second, I type directly the URL as I do with any other website.
For my monitoring needs I have a bunch of Grafana dashboards connected to Prometheus. I check them from time to time because I like looking at the pretty colored graphs for some reason, but that's about it.