Note: I can only add two links max in this post.
Examples for my workaround:
home.domain.toplevel = home.example.com
domain.toplevel = example.com
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I added a custom domain for home.domain.toplevel - this should become the subdomain for my Home Assistant instance. Netbird told me to create a CNAME record *.home.domain.toplevel → netbird.domain.toplevel. I did exactly that.
After domain verification, I added a reverse proxy service for home.domain.toplevel. It points to http://(homeassistant-peer):8123.
When I created the service, it tried to issue a certificate. This process wouldn’t stop and I opened the webpage myself, only to be greeted by an error saying “home.domain.toplevel’s DNS address could not be found. Diagnosing the problem.”.
I tried adding a CNAME record for home.domain.toplevel → netbird.domain.toplevel (no wildcard), because I thought this would solve the problem. I was mistaken.
The solution was to add:
CNAME record to *.home.domain.toplevel → netbird.domain.toplevel
A / AAAA (only tried A) record home.domain.toplevel → Netbird self-hosted VPS
After adding the A record, everything worked just fine and I could reach home.domain.toplevel.
This is exactly what I wanted with custom domains.
I also have another problem I’d like to mention in this feature request:
Not every provider supports wildcards, unfortunately. I have my Netbird instance domain on my provider which does support wildcards, while a friend has their own domain without wildcard support (Strato domain provider). The domain verification will never end when just trying to add nas.friend-domain.toplevel. We might have to just find a workaround for now.
Describe the solution you’d like
Of course, part of this problem is because I didn’t know much about DNS.
However, I would like if there is a hint of the A record in the custom domain creation right at the point where it mentions CNAMEs. This would save some time.
For non-wildcard setups, it would be nice if the domain verification optionally checks for e.g. A records only or if it can be skipped completely. My friend could easily point his nas.friend-domain.toplevel to my netbird.domain.toplevel instance without needing to worry about wildcards. Maybe this could also be helpful at Netbird installation since I changed my provider just for Netbird when I bought my new domain just for wildcard support.
Thank you very much for reading this feature request. To anyone else having this problem, I hope this topic helped you.