Every public request to one of my sites used to go through a Cloudflare tunnel. I had a cloudflared deployment in my cluster, some routing rules, and everything just worked. And it was free! But that bugged me. TANSTAAFL right? The whole point of selfhosting is to not rely on big cloud company, and there are few bigger than Cloudflare. And Cloudflare’s tunnels decrypt every single packet, so they see everything you do. I really don’t like that.

So I’ve replaced Cloudflare tunnels with Erwan Leboucher’s towonel, a selfhosted tunnel implementation. I still have my DNS on Cloudflare, but no data is moving through them any more.

  • Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu
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    1 hour ago

    I don’t get the need for those tunnels.

    Wouldn’t a simple wireguard setup be enough un less you are behind CG-NAT?

    Wireguard it’s there, free, open source, doesn’t rely on any external server or company…

    What does these “tunnels” actually add?

    • Zikeji@programming.dev
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      1 hour ago

      The benefit here is the software by design can’t read your traffic - it’s using SNI to route, not the host header, so SSL pass thru keeps the payload private. It’s billed as shareable for that reason.

      Also this is open source and you can host it yourself.

      • Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu
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        22 minutes ago

        You missed my point?

        why can’t you just use a wireguard connection between your device and the server, or network?