Looking for DNS help with NGINX PM, PiHole, and Tailscale
reddit / selfhosted

----------------------------------------------------------------------
crayiii · 2023-12-21 19:15

I'm way out of my knowledge base on this so I'm really hoping someone
can help me.

Here's what I'm trying to do:

We live in a remote area and have satellite Internet that can be
spotty.

I have a server set up with several docker containers so we can self
host everything possible.

Most of the containers want SSL to work properly so I set up a DNS
with duckdns and pointed it to the internal ip address of the server
hosting the docker containers.  I set up NPM and got a ssl cert from
lets encrypt then pointed xxx.yyy.duckdns.org to the IP/port of the
the server and docker containers.

This worked without an issue after turning off rebind protection on
our router.

We want to be able to access these services when we're offsite so I
set up Tailscale and that works great.  I have a route set up on the
server so my remote devices can see the entire LAN.

The issue is when we are local to the LAN and there is a connectivity
problem, our DNS doesn't resolve and trying to go to the IP address
fails because of the ssl.

To try to get around this, I installed PiHole and set up local DNS
entries pointing to all the same domain names xxx.yyy.duckdns.org

Now, everything seems to work internal, external, and internal without
internet.  The issue is the DNS takes a long time to resolve.

I have the PiHole set up as the only DNS in the router and that's all
I see listed in the client settings.

I'm guessing I have some silly settings going on here that's causing
some type of DNS loops?