A Litany of Moving Parts

For whatever reason I feel it necessary to have 3 WAN in our house.

Main is a 1000/60 Coax line. Secondary is a 15/1 DSL. Third is via a CradlePoint AER1650 LTE + AT&T Mobile, which ... in our area is about as speedy as the DSL.

Was easy enough to get DDNS working via the UCG Max and Cloudflare, for the first two WAN. But pretty sure the LTE network uses CG-NAT so that wasn't ever going to play nicely.

I've been wanting a VPS for awhile but just never really had too much justification. But I started poking around r/selfhosted yesterday and found a suggestion that seemed insanely reasonable. $4.20/month for a minimal but usable VPS. Was sold.

So setting a new A record pointing to the VPS, which is VPN'd back to my main server. Just point OpenVPN at the VPS instead and it pipes me to where I need to be. It's work very well and was dead simple to setup.

So I decided to move this site's container from my local server to the VPS. Copied over the relevant files and volumes, just needed some minor tweaks to get it running. Which was nice, I had a helluva time migrating it from a miniPC to my main server a few months back that basically lead to me just scrapping it and starting mostly from scratch.

Then I was off to get nginx acting correctly, which in and of itself isn't that bad. I'm still learning it's nomenclature and layout but I can get by easy enough.

But for some gd reason my IP on Cloudflare kept setting itself back to my IP on WAN1 and for HOURS I couldn't figure it out. Turns out if I actually spent more than 30 seconds looking at the Cloudflare audit log I would've caught it. But since I didn't, I was poking around looking for ddclients, putting mad suspicion on the UCG Max's DDNS ability...but no matter what I did the damned IP kept reverting.

I did eventually put DDClient on the VPS, which seemed like pointless redundancy as that IP shouldn't be changing any time soon. But this just created a battle of DDNS clients one of which I couldn't find.

Then I started looking at the json files from the audit log and saw it clear as day. HOME ASSISTANT! I had setup the Cloudflare integration at some point, and must've done it without API Key...as I cleared those out entirely. Every hour on the hour it would change the IP on Cloudflare.

Embarrassingly easy fix.

I love learning this stuff, practicing it, seeing what it and I can do. But it's insane how unforgiving it can be at times lol