• Cloudflare tunnel (was: Google Discontinues ...)

    From Oli@21:3/102 to Weatherman on Wednesday, February 02, 2022 10:51:05
    Weatherman wrote (2022-01-31):

    I really want to test out Cloudflare's tunnel service (which is free).
    You can get around carrier-grade NATs or anything and still host services directly on the Internet in the Cloudflare network.

    You run the client on the particular system, set it up to allow a particular service or the entire host itself, setup a CNAME to point to
    the tunnel ID in Cloudflare - and boom! You have your service directly
    on the Internet bypassing all the ISP blocks, carrier grade-NATs, etc.
    No need for a static IP or even a public IP. No opening ports on your
    home firewall, port forwards, or anything. Just really cool!

    AFAIK this only works for HTTP(S) connections, no SSH, no Telnet or Binkp. The problem is that you domain is pointing to shared IP addresses. With HTTP and TLS the domain name is transmitted by the client, but cloudflare cannot proxy a plain TCP connection to the right destination.

    Of course you can tunnel through websocks or use the cloudflared client to connect to your server. But that involves some manual configuration on the client (caller) side.

    https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/get-started/network-ports

    Maybe it is possible with some paid plan. Cloudflare offers more and more services. It starts to get overhelming. First they offered proxy and DNS services, now we have tunnels and VPN, Teams, "serverless" workers, storage, Email, ... and the web interface gets more and more crowded. Reminds me of Google a couple of years ago.

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    * Origin: Birds aren't real (21:3/102)