I’m re-setting up my HomeLab and one of the things I’m trying to learn about on this go-around is Zero Trust networking. To accomplish this I am planning on using NetBird’s mesh overlay network. I would like all of my services to use the NetBird mesh network at all times, whether they are communicating within my homelab’s LAN or I am accessing them from outside via the greater internet.

I have successfully set up the NetBird management interface on a Hetzner VPS, however the issue I run into is if I lose internet access at home, none of my services are able to function as they can no longer reach the management interface. However, if I self host the management interface in my homelab, I am unable to access it from outside my home LAN.

I’ve identified 2 solutions that could solve this:

  1. Self host the management interface and set up a Cloudflare tunnel to the management interface, which would allow access from outside my home network.

  2. Self host the management interface, then set up a wireguard proxy/tunnel on a VPS that forwards traffic to my management interface (Similar in my mind to option 1, but not relying on Cloudflare)

What are your thoughts? Any other ideas?

I appreciate your comments/criticisms!

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    Okay, so two really big things:

    1. You’re confused a bit on how network routing works. If you’re building something that bridges multiple networks (local + VPN + VPS), you need to know about how to route things to different places. You’re dealing with 3 networks at this point.

    2. You might be misunderstanding how “zero-trust” and local networking fit together. Right now you have some local machines at least, AND a router. You don’t need all of your local machines to individually bridge a gap to your VPS, you want it the other way around.

    If the majority of your machines are local, then make that your hub. Everything else should be a client. Adding all these individual nodes to routes in a mesh network makes absolutely no sense, and will definitely cause routing problems, if not something like ARP poisoning (we can’t see your config).

    Just make the remote machine clients to your local network and be done with it.