Accessing Helpdesk securely over the Internet (inspired by my homelab)

[jimbarr]

Issue:

We fully committed to Lansweeper's Helpdesk many years ago, and while we do love it, one caveat is that we can only access it on-premisis and not remotely over the internet.

And since Lansweeper has stated that they will NOT integrate it into Lansweeper Cloud, I'm trying to determine what the best Internet-based helpdesk solution would be. Personally, I'd like to stay with Lansweeper Helpdesk.

Which brings be to my homelab...

Background:

I host several applications and services from a homelab server in my home. Several services (web a site for example) are openly accessible from the Internet using a Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared). This lets anyone remotely connect to these services without me needing to open any ports on my router. And because it's going through a Cloudflare Tunnel, my home IP is never exposed.

In addition to the Cloudflare Tunnel, when I want to restrict access to several applications, (such as to a personal application or a remote connection to a local server or PC on my local LAN) I add a Cloudflare Application to the service. This provides secure authentication at Cloudflare such that when anyone tries to access the applicaiton from the Internet, Cloudflare prompts for authentication. If it succeeds, the user gains access. It authentication fails, the user does not gain access. And because the authentication takes place at Cloudflare, the user never gets to my site if they cannot pass authentication.

Possible Solution:

So thinking out loud, could we install a Cloudflare Tunnel on our on-premisis Lansweeper server to provide the Internet connectiviy and then create a Cloudflare Application to provide authentication to gain access to Lansweeper? This would allow me securely to connect to Lansweeper (and by extension Helpdesk) from any Internet connection.

Thoughts?

(Oh, and all this can be done with a Coudflare free tier account.)

[ammayer8]

We solved this problem with 0365 application proxies. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/app-proxy/application-proxy

[Lynn590]

This is exactly what we do in our org. Sure, there is a bit of latency, but it does what it needs to do. Plus, most of our users just email in tickets anyways, but having the azure app proxy is really nice when I want to work from home.

[Lennart]

I have not used Cloudflare my self, but if I´m guessing right, you can access your local web-server you have at home, from any computer in the world by login on Cloudflare like a portal, and anyone else can also if they got an account with the rights to access?

To me it´s seems you already have the most of the infrastructure in place, and only have to add lansweeper to the suite.

I agree with Ed that a VPN solution would be great, especially if you have the need to access more of you home-network to do maintenance or reboot of server. But it may be a challenge if you have 100 users of various degree of computer knowledge, and must have assess to helpdesk. In that case, Cloudflare may be better for them, and VPN for you 🙂 .

[Ed]

It would be 10x easier to just setup a VPN to your internal network.  OpenVPN is a popular and free solution that will allow you to do this.  If you want to access your internal ticketing system I am sure you will also use the internal access to resolve tickets when not on site.

[Mercedes_O]

Hi  @jimbarr   @rader  @Mister_Nobody  @KevinA-REJIS @Lennart usually have some good suggestions hopefully they are able to chime in here and help