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Cloudflare Tunnel with Docker
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There’s been a few times where I needed to setup access to an internal web application but I couldn’t put it on 443 or 80 because something else was using those ports and a reverse proxy would break one of the applications. A solution to this is Cloudflare Tunnel.

Cloudflare Tunnel used to be called Warp when it was in beta and was eventually renamed to Argo Tunnel. When Cloudflare made Argo Tunnel free they renamed it to Cloudflare Tunnel. The magic of Cloudflare Tunnel is handled by a small but powerful client that is known as cloudflared.

What makes a Cloudflare Tunnel awesome is the fact that you can use it to host an application externally without opening any ports on your firewall. It does this by creating an outbound only tunnel directly to Cloudflare.

For my situation I needed to setup access to an internal web application but I didn’t want to do another port forward to make it work. My solution was Cloudflare Tunnel with Docker.

The way I set it up is slight different than what Cloudflare’s documentation says as I wanted to use the Zero Trust dashboard and Docker but also have it in a Docker Compose file, as cloudflared seems to get updated at least once a month and I wanted it to be easy enough to recreate. Here’s how I did it and how everything works.

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Upgrade Palo Alto Firewall HA Pair (Active/Passive)
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Palo Alto has some great documentation about how to do basically everything. Sometimes it’s a bit buried. This is my short and long cheat sheets for upgrading a Palo Alto Networks firewall in an Active/Passive High Availability Pair.

Quick Cheat Sheet

Long Cheat Sheet

Upgrade path and sanity checks

For my example FW01 is the Primary firewall and currently Active firewall and FW02 is the Secondary firewall and currently Passive firewall and they are both running PAN-OS 10.1 version 10.1.6-h6 which is the current preferred release for that version. We will be upgrading them to PAN-OS 10.2 version 10.2.2-h2 which is the current preferred release for that version.

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Azure AD Connect 2.0 Won’t Start
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I recently ran into an issue where an install of Azure AD Connect failed to start. It seems like the root cause was due to the SQLLocalDB Model database becoming corrupt, which caused it to fail at upgrading itself. This is a known issue in versions older than 2.1.1.0 of Azure AD Connect.

While looking at the event logs it looks like the chain of events was that it tried to do the auto upgrade as auto upgrade is enabled but then failed to restart the SQLLocalDB due to the corruption which then caused Azure AD Connect to break.

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Setting Up Cloudflare Access
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Cloudflare Access

I’ve been a fan of Cloudflare for a while now. I love how fast they can propagate DNS changes and I typically like to use them as a DNS resolver. An issue that I’ve ran into many times, is how to protect something with MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) that doesn’t have any support for MFA.

This problem is common with legacy web applications and very common with SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) web applications. The issue I was trying to solve was how to put MFA in front of a SCADA web application.

I decided to use Cloudflare Access. Cloudflare Access goes by a few names some of them are Cloudflare Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloudflare Access, and Cloudflare Zero Trust Access. For simplicity I’m going to refer to it as Cloudflare Access.

Cloudflare Access is really nice because you can put it in front of any web application and it will require the user to authenticate before they can even reach the website.

If you have a lot of applications like this you can even set it up so the users can login to a portal to see all of the applications that are available to them. You can do all of this without the user having to install anything. What’s even better is that it’s free for 50 users.

Here’s how I setup a SCADA web app with Cloudflare Access.

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Windows Recovery Partition
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When you install Windows it always creates a Recovery Partition, which runs a very lite version of Windows with a few tools. There’s been a few times where I’ve used those tools to fix a system.

I wanted to know what would happen if I deleted the Recovery Partition. This is what I found down that rabbit hole.

Your Windows partitioning will look something like this.

Disk Partitioning with Recovery Partition
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