Tunneling 2: Electric Boogaloo

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 22:46:41 -0700

Why though?

In my previous post, I worked to set up Pangolin as a self-hosted alternative to something like Cloudflare tunnels. I got it working well enough, but something was nagging at me. We can see the old quote:

After a little digging (not a ton tbqh, but enough to start throwing yaml at the wall and seeing what sticks)

Shoulda done a little more digging, I would’ve realized that I couldn’t just fully declare the config. You do a bit of configuration with Pangolins blueprints feature, but that doesn’t get quite as deep as I’d like. There’s a lot of stuff which still needs to be manually configured on the VPS.

Exposing Services More Safely

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:41:55 -0700

Fuck, it’s so easy to rely on LLMs to configure and write things for you. I should try to learn what I’m doing, and do it once, before turning the barely controllable hallucination machine loose to do what it wants in my repos.

Digging the tunnel myself

Lets talk about what the goal is here: I want to expose the services I host to the internet, but in a safe(r) way. Cloudflare Tunnels offer to do that, but I don’t want to use something proprietary like that, which would lock me into a single vendor.

Kubernetes on Atomic Purple

Tunneling 2: Electric Boogaloo

Why though?

Exposing Services More Safely

Digging the tunnel myself