Learning Docker on the Pi

January 2, 2023 - 2 minutes read - 221 words

Learning Project: Securing Remote Access to Home Network

I had a recent need to update the Raspberry Pi running Cloudflare tunnels to the edge of my home and camera networks. I figured I might as well use the opportunity to run services in containers, and get some hands on experience with Docker.

I also figured that I’d run the Pi-hole DNS black hole and ad blocker too.

I anticipated that I’d learn how to:

configure containers
configure containers to run in a specific network
troubleshoot the setup because nothing ever works right the first time

Cloudflare Tunnels and Authentication with an IdP

I’ve been using Cloudflare tunnels to provide remote access to my camera network and SSH to the server. I like it because it’s a service that’s easy to maintain, and the authenticaion is configured as a service. For example, you can use Okta or Google as your IdP, and only allow access to users with email addresses that you configure.

Service Diagram

Diaram showing 3 docker containers running in a briged network named cloudflared, and one docker container running on the host to provide SSH access. The 3 containers in the cloudflared network are cloudflared, nginx, and pihole. nginx is the reverse proxy for the camera network. pihole functions as the DNS server for the containers, host, and home network clients.

Code Repo

You can check out all the details and get the code from my repo. I included all the troubleshooting tips I learned in the README, which I hope helps anyone else who wants to try out this project to learn how containers interact with each other. If you do try it out, let me know.