That bring said... I just moved my homeserver to another city... and I plugged in the power, then I plugged in the ethernet, and that was the whole shebang.
Tunnels made it very easy. No port forwarding no dns configuration no firewall fiddling no nothing.
The trouble with cloudflare is that there is just one. It’s one of the best registrars out there, the only free/cheap and usable DNS host (have you seen what route53 charges per zone??). That without getting into the whole tunnels and DDoS mitigation end of things, which is nearly unique at any price point.
The problem with cloudflare is that we’re missing three other cloudflares to move to if they decide to pull evil shit.
Why does Cloudflare get a pass on the "if it's free, you're the product" mantra of the self-hosting community? Honest question. They seem to provide a lot for free, so...
we should definitively have a wiki (though people should use "search" too, I wonder if a wiki would help really). This "topic" comes every month. I have posted this already, here it goes again: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
Sure it's easy to set up, but the same behaviour is what I get with my handrolled solution. I rent a cheap VPS with a fixed IP solely for forwarding all traffic through wireguard. My DNS entries all point to the VPS and my servers connect to the VPS to be reachable. It is absolutely network agnostic and does not require any port shenanigans on the local network nor does it require a fixed IP for the internet connection of my home server.
Data security wise the HTTPS terminates on my own hardware (homeserver with reverse proxy) and the wireguard connection is additionally encrypted. There are no secrets or certificates on the rented VPS beyond the bare minimum for the wireguard tunnel and my public key for SSH access.
Shuttling the packets on the VPS (inet to wireguard) is done by socat because I haven't had the will or need to get in the weeds with nftables/iptables. I am just happy that it works reliably and am happy to loose some potential bandwidth to the kernelspace/userspace hoops.
Unless you are behind CGNAT; you would have had the same plug+play experience by using your own router instead of the ISP supplied one, and using DDNS.
Well, centralization and giving up your freedoms, letting someone else control you, is always kinda easy. Same applies to all the other big tech companies and their platforms. I'd say it applies to other aspects of life, too.
And I'd say it's not far off from the usual setup. If you had a port forward and DynDns like lots of people have, the Dns would automatically update, you'd need to make sure the port forward is activated if you got a new router, but that's pretty much it.
But sure. if it's too inconvenient to put in the 5 minutes of effort it requires to set up port forwarding everytime you move, I also don't see an alternative to tunneling. Or you'd need to pay for a VPS.
Is there a way to do reverse tunnels, or something like it, so not opening any ports at all on the network, without cloudflare?
Closest to that XP I got was generating VPN keys and distributing them to close friends, running DDNS (no-ip) on my Pi with a pivpn server and then accessing JellyFin that way.
Do you have a VPS or server with its own IPv4 address outside your home?
If you want I can maybe help you with configuring my new tool/service to replace Cloudflare Tunnels
But it depends on how you use it also, if you want to explain that send me a reply or a private message and I can answer if I think it is possible and give you the basic configuration for it, or check out the project and its sources I posted here
I have written a small blog post about Bypassing CGNAT, and have also mentioned why Cloudflare is not something you should be using if you're self hosting for privacy.