If you haven’t noticed, I’m seriously impressed with Cloudflare Zero Trust, but one feature remained missing - ad blocking. I was a longtime user of Pi-hole and loved the simplicity of it all. If you aren’t aware, Pi-hole is deployed on a Raspberry Pi and blocks ads, trackers, and other nasty sites by using DNS block lists. You can also block or allow specific domains with a new rule from the Pi-hole dashboard....
The use of Regular Expression (REGEX) for your Cloudflare Zero Trust Gateway policies delivers some seriously powerful solutions. I ran into issues when attempting to get things working because I was attempting to use traditional REGEX. That is until I found, buried in Cloudflare’s documentation, that Gateway used Rust to evaluate expressions rather than what I was accustomed to using. At the suggestion of Cloudflare, I visited Rust REGEX to build and test expressions....
There are a few different options when looking to use DNS over HTTPS with Cloudflare Zero Trust. I considered dusting of my Raspberry Pi, yet again, to deploy Cloudflared to tie into my Zero Trust setup but didn’t want to bother with the setup and management of another network device. Instead, I opted to live with non-encrypted DNS across my home network with the exception of our desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones....
As promised, I’m here to give you a simple guide to get you up and running on Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform. Take a moment to read my previous post, Cloudflare Zero Trust in the event you are looking to understand what Cloudflare Zero Trust has to offer. If you’ve already done your homework or want to dive right into setup, then you found the right place - lets get started....
My Home Network Security Journey I’ve used Cloudflare DNS for a number of websites over the years, but only recently discovered some of their more interesting offerings. I had used a pfSense appliance on our home network along with pfBlocker to keep our network secure and my kids off of inappropriate sites. Unfortunately, my SG-3100 started to act up and pfBlocker was also not as reliable. I dusted off a Raspberry Pi, loaded up Pi-hole, and threw it on my network with some improvements, but I missed many of the features pfSense offered....