Let’s say I setup some subdomains and then point them to my home server via Cloudflare tunnel.
If I use one of those subdomains from my personal PC on the same network as my home server, to watch a movie for example, is all of that traffic going out to the internet and then back? Or does all the traffic stay internal once the connection has been made?
Depends on the server obviously, but most will pass off their local once the initial handshake is made.
Once that is done, DNS isnt relevant anymore.
Edit: This is especially true for media (movies, TV) servers.
How does that work? Do they do something like what tailscale does to negotiate the connection? Can you point me to any doco for how that works?
Uhh, this might be true for WebRTC, except not much uses WebRTC other than for realtime streaming/calling. Jellyfin for example is just an mp4 stream over http; and http(s) will only use the IP in the DNS record. I’d like to see a packet capture if you are certain something is switching IP.