Cloudflare, ProtonMail & Substack
An affordable fortress.
There are a lot of people in the world today who are contemplating how to run a tighter ship. Let’s take a look at how I set up rauhauser.net as my Substack vanity domain, and then offered Disinfodrome to a limited audience.
Attention Conservation Notice:
This is technical, but not overpoweringly so. There are simple, low cost things one can do to establish a fuckery resistant presence. If you have no need of such a thing, just make a mental note of the tools named in the title for future reference.
Domain Ownership:
I’ve owned rauhauser.net for about twenty years. Right from the start its address was 1060 West Addison, Chicago, Illinois. But the internet is full of impotent ankle biters and one of them periodically filed ICANN complaints about it, so under the current proxy registration it just has a PO box right near there.
Having the domain was just the start. I didn’t proxy register because 1) the street address was Wrigley Field and 2) it matched the profile I set up in MyLife with a debit card that was going to expire the next month. Every time there was a little public attention on me, some poor bastard paid for a MyLife, and ends up watching that video, which pleases me to no end.
Cloudflare:
The Cloudflare CDN (content delivery network) is an amazingly powerful globally distributed system to serve your web content rapidly, while protecting your systems and their available bandwidth. Since I am a little fish, I only use a few of the things they offer. I’ve been meaning to dig deeper, and this is the month for it.
Over the years the role account I use for Cloudflare work has been added to various clients, this is one of the larger of them. Look down the left hand column to see the menagerie of offerings.
The stuff I use in there are the DNS (domain name service) functions, which require clicking through to a domain, the WAF (web application firewall), and Zero Trust. If your eyes are sharp you can see dividers below Trace, Turnstile, IP Addresses, Email Security, and Calls. That large next to last section is globally distributed stuff, like Amazon’s EC2. As I said, I’m a little fish, and I don’t go into those deep waters.
Once you click through to a domain, you get another herd of functions down the left side of the page. This Substack passed 1,800 followers last Monday, but the daily unique visitor count corresponds fairly well to the 459 subscribers.
Here’s the actual setup for rauhauser.net. I still use a variety of email providers, but I pay €115 a year to have email for myself and Fluff Warrior. Using a domain with Substack is a $50 onetime fee. The mysterious text records have to do with email security and using Google Analytics to see activity on the site. All Cloudflare is doing for me is providing a fancy interface to an industrial strength DNS service. See the “DNS only” in the Proxy status column? I’m literally using none of the anti DDoS features - that’s Substack’s problem, not mine.
Disinfodrome:
I was mucking about in Cloudflare due to the end of Disinfordrome when I decided to write this. Unlike ProtonMail/Substack, this was a cluster of real systems, mostly running Open Semantic Search. OSS is a tolerable toolkit for handling large volumes of documents, but it is NOT enterprise ready - there’s no sense of accounts and access controls in its interface. I had a large server so it was easy to set up multiple instances and to provide authentication/authorization I turned to the Access function in Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access.
ZTNA is another enormous vista of functionality, but just like the CDN functions, there are only a few things a small operator needs. Disinfodrome had a few dozen users at its peak accessing half a dozen OSS instances. They would enter the name for the pair of systems belonging to an instance, then they’d receive a six digit code via email that would grant them access.
Had I not taken the time to explore Cloudflare’s offerings I’d have ended up with some grim mess here, probably requiring people to provide origin IP addresses and then using an ssh tunnel to access the services. That would have cut the uptake from a busload down to the maximum number of college kids you could cram into a Pontiac Fiero GT.
Conclusion:
If you dig deep enough into Cloudflare, you will no doubt find a tab containing the controls needed to launch a space shuttle, but …
DO NOT BE INTIMIDATED
Doing all the things with Cloudflare is a job for a dedicated, highly paid team of professionals. But you, even as a not terribly technical user, can employ it for free and without too much of a learning curve.
