This is the second part in my series on taking the Devember challenge and improving my homelab and network. You can find the previous post here.
The first step in re-vamping my homelab was to finally purchase a domain. I was a complete novice on domain, dns, and
subnet management going into the challenge, so I asked some friends about it. Fortunately, the process was much simpler
than I anticipated. It was suggested that I shop based on price alone, with an eye on whois privacy features secondarily.
I did some shopping around and ended up buying my last name: komoro.ski. There are cheaper top level domains, but I
thought this was fun. I made my purchase at porkbun.com, smaller domain name registrar which
has some excellent pricing. After buying the domain, I then needed to sort out DNS.
After getting some direction from a co-worker, I started by creating a free account at cloudflare, who have a free tier for DNS management among other features. I added my domain as a zone in cloudflare and then went to porkbun and set the suggested cloudflare name servers as the authoritative domain servers for the domain. I went back to my cloudflare account and created my first dns record by creating a CNAM entry for this site (blog.komoro.ski). I pointed it to my github pages domain, which was where I was hosting this blog at the time. I then created several dns records for the servers on my network (synology nas, raspberry pis, main server, etc); everything I had configured with a static ip in my gateway got a dns record.
I since I opted to use cloudflare for my dns management, I needed to find a way to update my home network’s public ip with cloudflare. After a bit of searching I found a python script which calls the cloudflare api to update dns records. The project publishes a docker container which makes deployment easy. I followed the instructions, created an api key, and made a configuration file. To get started I deployed the container to my main server.
In my next blog post I’ll go over setting up my Unifi Dream Machine Pro to run a Wireguard VPN Interface and the cloudflare ddns container.