Cloudflare Tunnels

Cloudflare Tunnels can be used to access PiKVM over the internet securely using Cloudflare Zero Trust with the cloudflared daemon. This is a convenient and free (for private use) tool for allowing access to web services running on your internal network without port forwarding or IPv4/IPv6 compatability issues. This document is provided as an example for accessing your PiKVM over the internet but you can also use Zerotier/Tailscale/Insert XYZ VPN service here. Basic support like whats shown below is provided as an example, any other setting or functionality needs to be redirected to the appropriate community.

Prequisites

1. A domain utilizing Cloudflare for DNS

2. A Cloudflare tunnel configured with an application created and secured by an access policy

Cloudflare Tunnel Steps

1. Login to Cloudflare and provision a tunnel using the steps here. Save the tunnel token as we will need this later. In most cases the target will be https://localhost

2. Create a self-hosted application with the URL matching one created in the previous step by following the steps here.

   • You will need to check the http options to disable SSL certificate verification under Tunnels -> Configure -> Public Hostname -> yourapplication.yourdomain -> Edit -> TLS Settings -> No TLS Verify as the PiKVM uses self-signed certificates.

   • Don't skip the access policies as this important to preventing randoms from the internet from gaining access to your PiKVM. Cloudflare offers a variety of login options with the simplest being One-time PINs that are emailed to you. NOTE: This external authentication will not replace the username/password for the PiKVM but instead supplement it acting as a first line of defense from the internet.

Installation

Unfortunately Cloudflare does not provide binaries for ARM so we need to compile from source to generate a working build.

On the PiKVM side

1. Use these commands:

   # rw
   # pacman -Syu go
   # curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/cloudflare/cloudflared/releases/latest | grep "tarball_url" | cut -d '"' -f 4 | xargs curl -LJo cloudflared-latest.tar.gz
   # tar -xzvf cloudflared-latest.tar.gz --transform 's|[^/]*/|cloudflared/|'
   # cd cloudflared/cmd/cloudflared/
   # go build
   # mv cloudflared /usr/bin/cloudflared
   # cloudflared version
   

2. Create the service configuration file

   # systemctl edit --full cloudflared.service
   

3. Insert the following configuration replacing TOKEN VALUE with your token from the Cloudflare tunnel step.

   [Unit]
   Description=Cloudflare Tunnel
   After=network.target
   
   [Service]
   TimeoutStartSec=0
   Type=notify
   ExecStart=/usr/bin/cloudflared --protocol quic tunnel run --token <TOKEN VALUE>
   Restart=on-failure
   RestartSec=5s
   

4. Afterwards verify service is started and stays running

   # systemctl enable --now cloudflared
   # systemctl status cloudflared
   

5. Open a web browser and attempt

Updating cloudflared

Use these commands to update the cloudflared daemon:

# rw
# rm -rf cloudflared/
# curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/cloudflare/cloudflared/releases/latest | grep "tarball_url" | cut -d '"' -f 4 | xargs curl -LJo cloudflared-latest.tar.gz
# tar -xzvf cloudflared-latest.tar.gz --transform 's|[^/]*/|cloudflared/|'
# cd cloudflared/cmd/cloudflared/
# go build && mv cloudflared /usr/bin/cloudflared
# systemctl restart cloudflared