Setup nginx as a v6 to v4 reverse proxy. Or the inverse if you have a public v4 in a vpc to use as a dmz.
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
29 points (93.9% liked)
Selfhosted
40173 readers
594 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I'd say running the VPS as a proxy or nat64 setup would be the way to go. Cgnat kinda messes everything up.
What I want to do. But the question is how?
VPS as a proxy... but when I point A record to VPS and AAAA record to server in my home, how would the VPS know which traffic to pass and how.
how would the VPS know which traffic to pass and how.
Install nginx in your VPS and configure it as reverse proxy to your home IPv6:
server {
listen 80; # listens only on IPv4 port 80
server_name example.com; # your domain name
location / {
proxy_pass http://[2a03:2880:f003:c07:face:b00c::2] # replace with your home server IPv6. Keep the brackets.
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
Point your A record to your VPS, and your AAAA to the home server.
- Security recommendation about
X-Real-IP: https://lemmy.world/comment/10392284 - Once your setup works, try to increase your security by using SSL / disabling plain HTTP: https://lemmy.world/comment/10398545
Be aware that doing it like this, the traffic from the VPS to your home will be unencrypted.
Yes, and wouldn't the traffic between his friend and his home server be encrypted as well? :)
The OP should first figure out how to do this with basic HTTP and then once it works he can do a more fancy setup like setup letsencrypt on the local server in order to have his website protected with a valid certificate.
Then he can configure the VPS Nginx instance to do SSL pass-thru on port 443. This makes it so the VPS will be able to receive HTTPS traffic and send it back to his home server without having to do SSL termination / decryption / dealing with SSL certificates. Only the home server will have the certificates thus be able to decrypt the traffic.
Once the website can be accessed from both servers directly with SSL he can proceed to disable plain text HTTP traffic. To do this simply remove the entire server { listen 80 section on both servers. The home server should end up server { listen listen [::]:443 ssl; section so it listens in both IPv4 and IPv6 for HTTPs traffic. The VPS should only have the stream at /etc/config/nginx.conf as described above - make sure the previous server block entry is removed from the VPS as it is no longer needed.
If the OP goes through all those steps then none of the servers will accept plain HTTP traffic and the VPS will only proxy encrypted data back to his home. The beauty of SSL pass-thru is that the VPS doesn't have the means to decrypt the traffic, you won't have to manage certificates in across two servers and it's way easier to setup than a WG tunnel.
Be careful with doing this. X-Real-IP and X-Forwarded-For are good for when the client is a trusted proxy, but can be easily faked if you don't whitelist who's allowed to use those headers. Somebody with IPv6 access could send "X-Real-IP: 127.0.0.1" or something and if the server believes it then you'll see 127.0.0.1 in logs and depending on what you're running the user may gain special permissions.
Also be careful with the opposite problem. If your server doesn't trust the proxy, it will show the VPS IP in logs, and if you're running something like fail2ban you'll end up blocking your VPS and then nobody will be able to connect over IPv4.
Fair enough yeah. :)
The OP can solve that potential security issue with this option: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_realip_module.html#set_real_ip_from on the local server nginx:
http {
(...)
real_ip_header X-Real-IP;
set_real_ip_from [2a03::aaaac::1]; # Replace with the VPS IPv6 address.
}
This will make sure only the VPS is allowed to override the real IP.
A and AAAA records can have different IPs, the VPS will know it's the host for your A and to forward AAAA to your home IP
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| HTTPS | HTTP over SSL |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
[Thread #778 for this sub, first seen 1st Jun 2024, 14:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Holy shit that's a great bot!
You'll want to install a reverse proxy of your choice on the VPS. Have clients access it over ipv4 and configure it to proxy pass it to your ipv6 address. Nginx at least is capable of doing ipv4 & ipv6 -> ipv4, I think the inverse should also be possible.
If you can't get the VPS to work, alternatively there's Cloudflare but last I checked streaming was a little out of their free terms. With it, you should just have to set your AAAA record and make the cloud orange, that way Cloudflare will proxy it, and IPv4 will work. There's also Cloudflare tunnels which lets you host websites without port forwarding anything.