Ever felt that little pang of anxiety when exploring a new country or venturing off the beaten path? Knowing where you are can be a huge comfort, offering a safety net for navigation, helping you retrace your steps to that amazing little cafe, and even letting loved ones follow your incredible journey. Think of it as your digital breadcrumb trail, ensuring you’re never truly lost and can always find your way back, or share your real-time experiences with those who matter most.

Now, you might be thinking, “Sounds great, but is it complicated?” Well, not anymore! Thanks to the magic of technology like Docker and containerization, setting up your own location tracking solutions has become surprisingly simple. Imagine having all the necessary software neatly packaged and ready to run in its own isolated environment – that’s essentially what Docker does. This makes deploying powerful tools like OwnTracks, which puts you in control of your location data, a breeze without the hassle of complex installations on your main computer.

PVE as Your Secure Server Room: Think of Proxmox (or any other virtual environment) as your private, digital server space where you can create isolated environments.

LXC: Your Dedicated, Secure Office: Inside Proxmox, you create a lightweight Linux Container (LXC). This is like a separate, locked office just for OwnTracks, keeping it isolated from everything else.

Deploy OwnTracks: You install the OwnTracks software within this secure “office” (your LXC). This is where the actual location tracking magic happens.

At this point your can access owntracks app inside your network so your data resides with you, which if you think about is pretty cool.

Now the bigger picture, exposing this over the WAN so that you along with all the pentesters out there could try their moves on it so it needs to be done the right way. Here is how we are going to secure it.

Nginx Proxy Manager: Your Secure Receptionist: To access OwnTracks, you use Nginx Proxy Manager. It acts like a secure receptionist, verifying requests and then securely directing you to your OwnTracks “office.”

Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel: Your Private, Guarded Tunnel: This creates a secure, encrypted connection from the internet directly to your “receptionist” (Nginx Proxy Manager). The best part, No one know where your receptionist resides, even if you do then you don’t know the office, I think we are secure enough at this point.

Your Own Domain: Your Memorable Address: You link this secure tunnel to your own domain name. This gives you an easy-to-remember web address to access your OwnTracks setup from anywhere in the world.

Install & Configure OwnTracks App: Install iOS or Android version of OwnTracks from the relevant stores and login to your OwnTracks & download the configs for your phone, I will say that I was having trouble expoing MQTT ports so I ended up getting the app working on 443 which to me good for my purpose.

Since your application is out there, you can just pass the URL with credentials to your loved ones to keep an eye on you from a distance or set a cron job to send out alerts with username and password for a tripDureation + 2 Days (surplus time to get back & disable the alert)

If you are into this kind of stuff & more then let me know so I can work on this on my weekends <sighs>, check the above diagram if you just want to skip the text & straight away mean business.