Tunnels

I use some sort of tunneling to put my internal services out there. Here are some ideas on tunnels and/or things that might achieve the same thing.

Ingredients:

• Any VPS or server which has portforwarding options for the ports you will need.
• Some service on another server that you will proxy to.
• Some technical knowledge.
• NGINX on the vps.

Route 1: Wireguard

I would just set up a Wireguard server, setup a NGINX webserver on the public server/VPS and proxy the requests through that NGINX server.

Route 2: NGINX

Here we are using NGINX's streams block to forward connections from a VPS to your homelab/server and thus hiding your IP address.

Installing NGINX

su -
apt update && apt -y upgrade
apt -y install nginx nginx-common libnginx-mod-stream # latter one should not be needed but I install it anyways

Configuring NGINX

cd /etc/nginx && mkdir rproxy && cd rproxy && mkdir stream stream/available stream/enabled
nvim stream/available/ssh.conf

Add the following content (example):

upstream ssh {
  server home-server-ip:22;
}

server {
  listen 22;
  proxy_pass ssh;
}

nginx.conf

cd /etc/nginx && nvim nginx.conf

Now change the following content:

  include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
  # include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
  include /etc/nginx/rproxy/http/enabled/*.conf;
}

stream {
  include /etc/nginx/rproxy/streams/enabled/*.conf;
}

So now, the Virtual Host section should look like this

# Virtual Host Configs
  include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
  # include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
  # include /etc/nginx/rproxy/http/enabled/*.conf; # Example this if you haev http rproxies.
}

stream {
  include /etc/nginx/rproxy/streams/enabled/*.conf;
}

Activating our configurations

ln -s /etc/nginx/rproxy/http/available/*.conf /etc/nginx/rproxy/http/enabled
ln -s /etc/nginx/rproxy/stream/available/*.conf /etc/nginx/rproxy/stream/enabled

Let's test if everything is correct:

nginx -t

Restart NGINX

systemctl restart nginx

And you're done!