Accessing my homelab with Cloudflare

18 Jul 2021

Cloudflare Access for my Homelab

I decided to use Cloudflare to setup a Secure Web Gateway and establish some Zero Trust access for my homelab services. Cloudflare offers a great service called “Cloudflare Access”. Basically it leverages Cloudflare’s edge network to create secure web routing. Setting up this service is just a matter of running a simple daemon. Once configured you setup Cloudflare DNS to route traffic. Let’s discuss how I setup Cloudflare Access. Create an SSH Bastion with Cloudflared Setup a Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu

Install Cloudflared Ubuntu/Debian install

wget -q https://bin.equinox.io/c/VdrWdbjqyF/cloudflared-stable-linux-amd64.deb
dpkg -i cloudflared-stable-linux-amd64.deb

Raspberry Pi

wget -q https://bin.equinox.io/c/VdrWdbjqyF/cloudflared-stable-linux-arm.tgz
tar -xyzf cloudflared-stable-linux-arm.tgz
sudo cp ./cloudflared /usr/local/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cloudflared
cloudflared -v

Create a tunnel with Cloudflared

cloudflared tunnel login A browser window will open asking for authentication from Cloudflare. Setup a “Self-hosted App” on Cloudflare Teams.

See this https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/applications/configure-apps/self-hosted-apps Configure tunnel on Raspberry Pi (or jump host) Find tunnel Id

cloudflared tunnel list

Create/Edit Cloudflared Configurations location: /home/pi/.cloudflared/config.yml tunnel: TUNNEL_ID_GOES_HERE credentials-file: /home/pi/.cloudflared/TUNNEL_ID.json

ingress:
  - hostname: rterm.eduardorobles.com
    service: ssh://localhost:22
  - service: http_status:404

Execute the tunnel

cloudflared tunnel run TUNNEL_NAME

Route DNS for tunnel

cloudflared tunnel route dns TUNNEL_ID rterm.eduardorobles.com

Access Raspberry Pi (or jump host) In browser go to https://rterm.eduardorobles.com Go through the login steps and you should be able to login to your jump host Connect from a client machine Install Cloudflared Configure SSH Config

Host rterm.eduardorobles.com
  ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/cloudflared access ssh --hostname %h

Adding another service Add settings to config.yml file Delete old config file /etc/cloudflared/config.yml Install service again

Accessing All of my Services

If you followed along you can see that in the last step we can add multiple ingress rules. For each service you want to router traffic to simply add it your configurations. In the example above I setup SSH access to my Raspberry Pi. Cloudflare can even render the SSH session in the browser for you.

rendering an SSH session in the browser

You can setup another machine with SSH to proxy your connection. But adding multiple ingress points allows you to access any and all of your services. Since you are using a Secure Web Gateway, your services are not automatically open on the internet.

I also a Zero Trust Policy was setup which allows for very locked down sites. I setup 2 Factor Authentication for my Web Gateway. In the end I feel happy with the results and recommend anyone try Cloudflare Access.

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