You could self host a web client

Well the internet down scenario has only happened once, and I returned home to no internet, booted up my laptop, and could not connect to any of my services since I couldn’t reach my control server. I haven’t forced the issue to occur by disconnecting my internet and testing connectivity. I just did the lazy thing and connected to the services I wanted via their IPv4 address

you’re almost certainly routing local network traffic over NetBird instead of using local routes

That’s precisely the functionality I want, though. Secure, encrypted, mutually identified traffic should be the only traffic in a zero trust network.

I’m simply trying to create an ingress point into this network for outside access.

Thanks for your response! I’m completely self-taught, so I’ll go ahead and acknowledge knowledge gaps on my end, but how would putting all the nodes in a network cause routing problems or ARP poisoning?

I recognize that what I’m trying to accomplish is a bit overkill for the average home network, and a lot of my reasoning behind my design is purely for learning. My reasoning for putting everything on a mesh network is 2-fold:

• Providing encrypted, secure, and mutually identified networking between all nodes
• Creating a centralized source of truth and control – NetBird runs its own DNS system behind the scenes, which allows all nodes to be addressed by name regardless of location, which interests me because it creates a single point of administration for ACLs, routing, etc. I’m also able to access any node I want across the mesh network as long as I’m connected to it.

I have successfully run this setup previously with the NetBird management console hosted in a VPS, however the issue I ran into was that if internet went down at home, I could no longer access my locally hosted services through the mesh network. I could still access them via IP, since I was on the same LAN, but that defeats my goal of centralized control, mDNS, and a central source of truth that I got via the mesh network.

I have also successfully ran this setup completely local, however I am unable to access it from outside my homelab. For my use case, I think having all components of the mesh network hosted within my homelab is the best design. However now I have to figure out the best way to allow external connections to my management interface. Thus my original question should I use a cloudflare tunnel to my management interface, set up a wireguard tunnel from an externally accessible VPS service pointed to my management interface, or something different?

Just trying to keep abreast of the latest ornithological news