I know that I can use 3rd party services to set up a tunnel, like Cloudflare, but I’d like to implement this myself.

I feel like every time I research this question I find all kinds of blogs / form posts across the timescape on the topic, and I’m just looking for whatever might be the most current or recommended best method of configuring a VPS tunnel. I’m behind a CG-Nat which is why I want to set one up.

If you’ve done this recently yourself, where did you get your info from?

Thanks!

  • chiisanaAEnglish
    1•9 months ago

    Doesn’t have to be a subdomain, but just good practice for hostnames to be a subdomain because hostnames generally represents a named server (subdomain) within an organization (domain). Also it makes things easier if you add additional servers in the future to just assign another hostname to the new server.

    I usually do:

    domain.ext - leave open, not used. servername.domain.ext - A records in DNS pointing to servers’ public addresses; (i.e. servera.domain.ext. A 10.0.0.123; serverb.domain.ext. A 10.0.0.234; etc.) service.domain.ext - CNAME to the server it is on (i.e. auth.domain.ext. CNAME servera.domain.ext

    This way it is super quick for me to move entire server to different provider (update A record) or move service to another server (update CNAME record) when I need to shuffle things around.

    If you’re running a public facing website, you could always CNAME your www and @ (or whatever your DNS provider uses to represent root domain) to your server specific A record entry.

    • Red Wizard 🪄OPEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      It’s funny, when you explain it, my IT hat goes on and I totally get it lol. I guess the context felt different enough that I didn’t get it. But I work with Windows domains all day and that’s exactly how DNS operates in that environment.

      Ultimately I think for a tunnel you’ll end up with your records pointing to your VPS. So you’ll have a *.domain.tld CNAME record and maybe a @ CNAME record and your nginx server on the other end of the tunnel would handle the routing.