Category Archives: Network

Information related to networking.

Docker, Network

Nginx Proxy Manager

Nginx Proxy Manager

Many services and devices in our home lab have web interfaces. We secure many of them using Nginx Proxy Manager as a reverse proxy.

Traefik Reverse Proxy provides ingress control and SSL certificates for our docker services. While Traefik can be used for services outside Docker, configuring it is complex and requires restarting the Trafik container. As a result, we also run Nginx PM in a container to enable SSL certificates and simple reverse proxy configuration of our web-based services outside of Docker.

Nginx Proxy Manager Installation

Installing is easy. The following video explains the process, including using a DNS-01 challenge to obtain SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt.

We configured a Docker macVLAN network for the Nginx PM container so that the proxy could determine the source IP addresses that access it. This enables IP filtering and other features.

Docker, Network

Pihole with a Cloudflare Tunnel

Pihole in Docker

We are running three Pihole installations, which enable load balancing and high availability for our DNS services. We also use a Cloudflare encrypted tunnel to protect information in external DNS queries via the Internet.

Our three instances are deployed on a combination of Docker host VMs in our Proxmox Cluster and a stand-alone Raspberry Pi Docker host.

Deploy Pihole with a Cloudflare Tunnel

Our software service stack for our dockerPiHole installs Pi includes the following applications:

Our combined stack was created using  information in the following video:


Deploy PiHole with Cloudflare Tunnel in Docker

Ubuntu Port 53 Fix

Unubtu VMs include a DNS caching server on port 53, which prevents Pihole from being deployed. To fix this, run the commands at this link on the host Ubuntu VM before installing the Pihole and Cloudflare Tunnel containers.

Scheduled Block List Updates

We must update our block lists by doing a Gravity pull. We do this daily via a cron job. This can be configured on the RPi host using the following commands –

# Edit the user crontab
sudo crontab -u <user-id> -e

# The following to the user crontab
min hr * * * su ubuntu -c /usr/bin/docker exec pihole pihole -g | /usr/bin/mailx -s"RPi Docker - Gravity Pull" your-email@mydomain.com
Docker, Network

Cloudflare DDNS

Cloudflare DDNS

We use Cloudflare to host our domains and the associated external DNS records. Cloudflare provides excellent security and scaling features and is free for our use cases.

We do not have a static IP address from either of our ISPs. This, coupled with the potential of a failover from our primary to our secondary ISP, requires us to use DDNS to keep the IPs for our domains up to date in Cloudflare’s DNS.

We run a docker container for each domain that periodically checks to see if our external IP address has changed and updates our DNS records in Cloudflare.  The repository for this container can be found here.

Deploying the DDNS update container is done via a simple docker compose yml –

version: '2'
services:
  cloudflare-ddns:
    image: oznu/cloudflare-ddns:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    container_name: your-container-name
    environment:
        - API_KEY=YOUR-CF-API-KEY
        - ZONE=yourdomain.com
        - PROXIED=true
        # Runs every 5 minutes
        - CRON=*/5 * * * *

You’ll need a separate container for each DNS Zone you host on Cloudflare.

Docker, Network

Docker Networking

Docker can create its own internal networks. There are multiple options here, so this aspect of Docker can be confusing.

Docker Networking Types

The following video explains the Docker networking options and provides examples of their creation and use.


Docker Networking Explained