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.
Well I have the vpn working but the connection seems to close after 2-5 minutes unless the client keeps talking to the server, at which point I have to ping the server from the client to re-open the tunnel. Is there a way to keep the tunnel open?
That sounds like a lack of port forwarding on at least one side. Ensure the vpn port is properly open on both sides. There is also an option you can add to the wireguard config for keepalive set it to something like 1min