We do a little homelabbing
May 2024
I arise from the grave with another post! I have acquired 3x HP ProDesk 405 G5 Minis that I am clustering together with Proxmox. It is definitely a lot of learning (and Google searches) to figure things out but the payoff has been amazing. I’m able to login with Tailscale from anywhere and access my servers and other services that I’m running at home. Side benefit, I get to use PiHole to surf the web safely and remotely.
The Champion: Tailscale
With any homelab, everyone comes across the question of VPN/remote access. I even bought a domain so I could use remote proxy things and access that way. But that’s way too complicated for smooth-brained me. No one will be accessing this besides me and I keep hearing about Tailscale (or reading about) from Xe Iaso. It’s free and supposedly does it all so why not that? It handles the DNS and authentication for me. Plus, I don’t need the custom domain but I already bought it. I’ll find something for it, don’t worry.
Accessing Proxmox through Tailscale
Now, I could be a simpleton and just do the http://tailscale IP:8006 to access the
UI. I guarantee there will be times that I will forget the number and I would
rather just do https://tailscale-name.ts.net and get the UI. So, let’s just
use tailscale serve 8006 / and I’m a happy camper. I can access the web UI
as long as I’m on my Tailscale network.
Grafana through Tailscale
Similar method here with Tailscale where I will use tailscale serve but I
will also combine it with the authentication headers that Xe Iaso has blogged
about before. This means I can just go to
https://grafana-tailscalename.ts.net and boom! I can blossom into data nerd
who stares at charts and graphs of my homelab.
DNS being DNS
With all the fun stuff set up, you would think it would be now just a simple
tailscale up on my laptop when I’m on the go and I get to connect to my
labs. Except, you are wrong! I was going through so many searches and trying
to figure out why only my laptop did this. My desktop, which also runs Arch
Linux, didn’t have this problem so why this one? Welp, it involves systemd
and something I did in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf.
From Tailscale documentation, Tailscale will overwrite the resolve.conf file
and then redirect the DNS to MagicDNS with is 100.100.100.100.
[Resolve]
# Some examples of DNS servers which may be used for DNS= and FallbackDNS=:
# Cloudflare: 1.1.1.1#cloudflare-dns.com 1.0.0.1#cloudflare-dns.com 2606:4700:4700::1111#cloudflare-dns.com 2606:4700:4700::1001#cloudflare-dns.com
# Google: 8.8.8.8#dns.google 8.8.4.4#dns.google 2001:4860:4860::8888#dns.google 2001:4860:4860::8844#dns.google
# Quad9: 9.9.9.9#dns.quad9.net 149.112.112.112#dns.quad9.net 2620:fe::fe#dns.quad9.net 2620:fe::9#dns.quad9.net
DNS=8.8.8.8 4.4.4.4
Oh, oh no. I forgot I was defaulting to Google. No matter what tailscale was doing, it would still use Google DNS. Welp, I’ll just comment that line back out aaaaaand…
resolvectl status:
Global
Protocols: +LLMNR +mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
resolv.conf mode: foreign
Current DNS Server: 100.100.100.100
DNS Servers: 100.100.100.100
Fallback DNS Servers: 1.1.1.1#cloudflare-dns.com 9.9.9.9#dns.quad9.net 8.8.8.8#dns.google 2606:4700:4700::1111#cloudflare-dns.com 2620:fe::9#dns.quad9.net 2001:4860:4860::8888#dns.google
DNS Domain: example-tailscale.ts.net # NOTE: not the actual domain
Ah, there we go. Now, things work just fine.