EXPOSE your home network to the INTERNET!! (it's safe)

About this video

The creator shows how to expose services on a home network to the internet with Cloudflare Tunnel, a free service, without port forwarding or opening ports 80 and 443 as a traditional reverse proxy would. Instead a connector installed inside the network creates an outbound tunnel to Cloudflare, and each exposed service gets its own subdomain and SSL certificate — even services that only have HTTP or a self-signed certificate internally, and even on connections affected by CGNAT. The requirements are a domain name, which he buys through Google Domains for about $12 a year in the example, a Cloudflare account on the free plan, and a computer or server at home. He moves the domain’s nameservers to Cloudflare, creates a tunnel in the Zero Trust dashboard, and runs the provided connector via Docker in the background on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine — noting Red Hat’s developer subscription for individuals can license up to 16 servers free, and he downloads RHEL 9.1. He then routes a Proxmox server (HTTPS, internal port 8006, with No TLS Verify for its self-signed cert) and a Synology NAS (port 5001) as public hostnames on the same single tunnel, and verifies both work from outside his network.

Key takeaways

• Cloudflare Tunnel exposes home services via an outbound tunnel, so no firewall holes, port forwarding, or public IP workarounds are needed — it works even behind CGNAT.
• Each service you publish gets its own subdomain and a Cloudflare SSL certificate, regardless of whether the internal service uses HTTPS or a self-signed cert.
• You need a domain with its nameservers pointed at Cloudflare, a free Cloudflare/Zero Trust account, and one internal machine running the tunnel connector, conveniently via Docker.
• One tunnel can carry many services: add more public hostnames in the dashboard and point each at the internal IP, port, and protocol of that service.
• For self-signed internal services, set No TLS Verify in the tunnel’s TLS options; the creator frames running RHEL at home as resume-worthy enterprise practice.

Episode details: published December 14, 2022 · 9:28 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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