I’ve spent too many hours googling this stuff without a solution in sight that I’m able to understand.

I am moderately new to selfhosting, especially the networking aspect. To put it simply, all I want is to be able to access my services through Tailscale by using subdomain.mydomain.com.

I have gotten so far to point my domain to my Tailscale IP (using Cloudflare’s DNS), so that I don’t have to copy paste the Tailscale IP, but that means I still have to type in the ports to the services. Between the posts saying Tailscale can handle this, to the ones saying Synology can do it, and the remaining posts saying to use a reverse proxy (and the ones saying reverse proxy are a bad idea because of Synology stuff) I am now very lost. The terminology is exhausting and everyone is already so knowledgeable that they skip the basic steps and go straight to complex, short answers.

I’d like to keep using Tailscale, as I don’t want to deal with security issues and SSL certificates and all that, and if possible I’d like to avoid using a reverse proxy such as npm or Caddy if there’s a built in Tailscale/Synology solution that works.

To me more services just means more stuff that can break, and I really just want this stuff to work without fiddling with it.

Thanks for any help you can provide

  • Dark ArcAEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    I’ve never used wildcard DNS, I’m not even sure that Namecheap DNS supports wildcard. But I’ve also never been in a situation where there’s a dominate single machine I want my DNS to resolve to.

    After searching … I’m not entirely sure I would use wildcard DNS https://serverfault.com/a/483625

    My preferred strategy is actually alias records and then one primary address record the alias records point to so if I change IPs I can move the machine. I forgot about that last night.

    • c10l@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      I don’t think I’ve ever come across a DNS provider that blocks wildcards.

      I’ve been using wildcard DNS and certificates to accompany them both at home and professional in large scale services (think hundreds to thousands of applications) for many years without an issue.

      The problem described in that forum is real (and in fact is pretty much how the recent attack on Fritz!Box users works) but in practice I’ve never seen it being an issue in a service VM or container. A very easy way to avoid it completely is to just not declare your host domain the same as the one in DNS.

      • Dark ArcAEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        Interesting; well it’s good info/good to know it exist … though, I’m probably going to stick to explicit listing. I like to be able to look at my DNS records and know what connects to what.