So I have some services and wireguard running locally on a “home” network. I also have wireguard, a DNS resolver, and a reverse proxy set up on a remote server. Since I don’t want to expose the home IP to the public, to access my services I connect to the VPN on the remote, which then forwards my request home. But this means that when I’m at home, connecting to my local services requires going out to the remote. Is there some way to have the traffic go over the switch when at home, but go over wireguard when away, without having to manually switch the VPN on/off?

I could move the DNS resolver (which handles the internal names for the services) from the remote to the home server. But then similarly every DNS request will need to go through both the remote and home servers, doubling the hops. I’d like to use my own DNS server at all times though, both at and away from home. Which tradeoff seems better?

edit: thanks for all the suggestions, I’ll look into some of these solutions and see what works best

  • bigredgiraffe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Okay lots of good info here but just to make sure it was clear that you are kinda solving two different but related problems. Connectivity with WireGuard or other VPN and split-horizon or multi-horizon DNS (Wikipedia) which also called a view sometimes (like BIND) and can also be done with two different DNS servers. You can sorta do it with AdGuard but it is tedious to maintain. If you are using a wildcard rewrite it works alright but that isn’t necessarily the same as a CNAME or subzone delegation.

    The next pice I’m not sure I saw mentioned is that WireGuard is not like other VPNs in that if two nodes are on the same network they will generally communicate directly peer to peer even over WireGuard addresses so you don’t really need to worry about traffic hairpin like you described unless you configure it to do so (which is more like traditional VPN would act). Tailscale is similar in concept but it uses different terms and technologies.

    Anyway not sure if that helped or made it more confusing but there are may ways to solve it so good luck! FWIW, my home network is currently set up with a public zone on a commercial provider. It has a wildcard CNAME to something like proxy.domain and that is an A record containing the WireGuard addresses. Then my local DNS overrides the one A record for the proxy internally which I only get when WG is off. I would rate this solution adequately functional but medium level of janky, 8/10 would use again :D