I’m looking into replacing cloudflare with a VPS running a reverse proxy over a VPN, however, every solution I see so far assumes you’re running Docker, either for the external reverse proxy host or the services you’re self hosting.
The VPS is already virtualized (perhaps actually containerized given how cheap I am) so I don’t want to put Docker on top of that. The stuff I’m self hosting is running in Proxmox containers on a 15 year old laptop, so again, don’t want to make a virtual turducken.
Besides, Docker just seems like a pain to manage. I don’t think it was designed for use as a way to distribute turnkey appliances to end users. It was made for creating reproducible ephemeral development environments. Why else would you have to specify that you want a storage volume to persist across reboots? But I digress.
Anyway, I want to reverse proxy arbitrary IP traffic, not just HTTP/S Is that possible? If so, how?
My initial naive assumption is that you set up a VPN tunnel between the VPS and the various proxmox containers, with the local containers initiating the connection so port forwarding isn’t necessary. You then set up the reverse proxy on the VPS to funnel traffic through the tunnel to the correct self-hosted container based on domain name and/or port.
You’re right, the VPS only serves the purpose of a static public IPv4 which I can use with a domain.
Honestly never thought to use a VPS like that before. We’ve all seen using a VPS as a VPN exit node. Do you run into quota limits on the VPS or Tailscale side? Too many requests/data?
I’m gonna have to look into this for fun lol
Nah, it’s a Hetzner CX23 with 20 TB of included traffic, which I will never exceed. And the setup is actually recommended because you don’t expose your actual server but only the VPS. I watched a video from the Headscale devs a few years ago where the recommended this type of setup.
EDIT: btop is reporting 6.72 TB down and 6.43 TB up in the past 329 days of uptime.
Ah I’ll have to look into this then…gotta find a VPS that will hopefully have a Los Angeles location and have decent traffic bandwidth.