I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels

Free Cloudflare account cannot be used to serve my Plex server. To me that's a no-go.

The specific term is: https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...

My free account runs cloudflared tunnel just fine for jellyfin. Is it just plex?

I use the tunnel because my girlfriend cant install tailscale on her work laptop, so this way she can still login to jellyfin while traveling.

It’s not that it can’t do it, it’s that it’s against the terms of service to use it for video.

It’s not enforced in practice unless you run a giant server with a lot of traffic.

Not sure if you are a representative from Cloudflare. But regardless, Cloudflare intentionally made it ambiguous so that they can selectively enforce it.

You can use Cloudflare for DNS, but you just can’t use them for proxying the traffic. I use Cloudflare with proxying on for everything other than a plex subdomain.

For sure. But OPs point still stands, people run giant Plex servers and charge for access to the pirated content on them. Huge numbers of users. I imagine they want to enforce on those folks and not people who just happen to have their own running.

Isn’t that for their CDN, rather than Zero Trust? I don’t think they even know what traffic is going over Zero Trust.

You can't play corporate videos over Cloudflare Warp? Where is the line drawn?

I think they don't want you using a boatload of bandwidth, since data proxies through their servers.

You could just disable cdn/caching.

Why would anyone expect anyone else to serve video for them for free? Is there any CDN that serves video for you for free???

I'm not even talking about the copyright implications here, just the bandwidth costs. A single movie download would cost more than many hundreds of typical simple HTTP website sessions.

Agreed, I have been doing this for years without consequences so far

> Why would anyone expect anyone else to serve video for them for free?

I would expect that a freemium service selling encrypted "zero trust" networking should have no idea what traffic is being pushed through my network making enforcement impossible.

Nobody's asking for a free lunch, but the reasonable thing to do would be to simply bandwidth limit freemium accounts across the board, not make exceptions for certain kinds of traffic in what should be a secure network.

Cloudflare does say "video and other large files" so in the end it is about volume, not data type. They probably just want to have the arbitrary decision on specific cases without defining a uniform blanket limit.

> it’s against the terms of service to use it for video

It for any large files. They want to limit bandwidth usage but not blanket limit everyone. One user using Plex of Jellyfin probably doesn't move the needle.

But those are different services. You linked the CDN TOS.

(I can, in practice, serve small amounts of video through the free CDN, by using HLS; I'm also aware that this needs to stay below the radar)

i use it for my jellyfin and it just works, been months like this

Do you have IPv6 from your ISP?

I use IPv6 only Emby and Jellyfin servers with my friends. We all have native IPv6 and it works well for us.

Yes and that's what people are criticizing - it's just an arbitrary and thus very bad rule. Completely unrelated to CloudFlare, I streamed a single TV series from a friend's plex account 1-2y ago, that's less traffic than some of my friends use in 2 weeks.

I'm not saying they can't have that rule, it's their infra - I'm just saying that "a boatload of bandwidth" can be anything, depending on who you ask.

I didn’t link anything.

FWIW, even if it’s against the rules I have been using Cloudflare tunnels for my Jellyfin server for months and I haven’t even gotten a nastygram yet.

I think it’s more of a “we reserve the right to…” situation than anything else.