Everything you wanted to know about using Cloudflare Zero Trust Argo tunnels for your personal network. For those like me who were still confused even after reading the article, I think this is the lowdown:
- ZT tunnels let you expose private resources/services to the internet (or your users) via Cloudflare’s edge network. You install cloudflared on an internal host, and register a “tunnel” so that requests to a hostname or IP get forwarded securely into your network (similar to tailscale).
- Unlike classic VPNs (which open full network access) or traditional Cloudflare tunnels (which merely publish a service), this approach adds granular access control; you can define exactly who can access which resource, based on identity, device posture, login method, etc.
- It also solves NAT/firewall issues often faced by P2P-based overlays (e.g., Tailscale) by routing everything through Cloudflare’s network, avoiding connectivity failures when peer-to-peer fails.
For in-browser auth you can then use Cloudflare Access, or you can install the cloudflare Warp client which is a VPN-like thing that would give you full control over the access to whatever service(s) you were exposing this way.
If today’s outage is anything to go by, you’re better off not using Cloudflare!!
I have continued to use it for public websites so that, in my thinking, at least the Cloudflare network is scrutinising who is accessing my webpages in case of attacks etc.
Pangolin is a simpler cloud reverse proxy, whereas Cloudflare has more bells 'n whistles for quick-set security. You just need to harden your VPS that Pangolin runs on. You can activate Crowdsec etc on it as well.
I run mine on a Hetzner VPS which has a nice firewall feature in the control panel securing the VPS ports for SSH and Pangolin tunnel to my home IP. Then it’s only ports 80 & 443 exposed. And I think from memory Pangolin doesn’t play nicely with UFW (well, Traefik doesn’t).
Outside of VPS firewalls settings and fail2ban, is there anything else you’d recommend to harden the VPS?
Not my expertise I’m afraid. Geoip blocking is straightforward with traefik (and Pangolin docs), Crowdsec is a little more complicated, and with the external firewall into the VPS, there isn’t much more I can think to do.
It’s likely more a factor of how secure Pangolin itself is at that stage.