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Comment on issues setting up nginx as an https proxy

I think that pihole would be the best option. But coming to think of it… I think that to make it work I’d need two instances of pihole. Since the server is basically straddling two nats. With the inner router port forwarding port 1403 from the server. Basically:

Home net (192.168.0.) { Laptop Homelab router (10.0.0., port 1403 forwarded) { Desktop

 Server( port 1403 forwarded to router)
}

}

To let me access the services both from the desktop and the laptop. I’d need to have two DNS resolvers, since for the laptop it needs to resolve to the 192.168.0.* address of the homelab router. While for the desktop it needs to resolve directly to the 10.0.0.* address of the server.

Also, little question. If I do manage to set it up with subdomains. Will all the traffic still go through port 1403? Since the main reason I wanted to setup a proxy was to not turn the homelab’s router into Swiss cheese.

… The rootCA idea though is pretty good… At least I won’t have Firefox nagging me every time I try to access it.

(specially with docker containers !)

Already on it! I’ve made a custom skeleton container image using podman, that when started. It runs a shell script that I customize for each service, while another script gets called via podman exec for all of them by a cronjob to update them. Plus they are all connected to a podman network with manually assigned IPs to let them talk to eachother. Not how you’re supposed to use containers. But hey, it works. Add to that a btrfs cluster, data set to single, metadata set to raid1. So I can lose a disk without losing all of the data. ( they are scrap drives. Storage is prohibitively expensive here) + transparent compression; + cronjob for scrub and decuplication.

I manage with most of the server. But web stuff just locks me up. :'-)

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N0x0n@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Sorry I didn’t respond earlier :S !

To let me access the services both from the desktop and the laptop. I’d need to have two DNS resolvers, since for the laptop it needs to resolve to the 192.168.0.* address of the homelab router. While for the desktop it needs to resolve directly to the 10.0.0.* address of the server.

I’m not entirely sure if I get what you mean here. If you have a central DNS resolver like pihole In your LAN it can resolve to whatever is there. I have a pihole which resolve to itself (can access it as pihole.home.lab) and resolves to my server’s reverse proxy, which handles all the port shenanigan and services hosted on my server. I think I can try to make a diagram to show how it works in my LAN right now, not sure if this can be helpful by any mean, but this would allow me to have a more visual feedback of my own LAN setup :P. However, I do use Traefik as my reverse proxy for my docker containers, so I won’t apply to nginx and I’m not sure if this is possible (It probably is, but nginx is a mystery for me xD)

Also, little question. If I do manage to set it up with subdomains. Will all the traffic still go through port 1403? Since the main reason I wanted to setup a proxy was to not turn the homelab’s router into Swiss cheese.

Your proxy should handle all the port things. Your proxy listens to all :80 :443 Incoming traffic and “routes” to the corresponding service and it’s ports.

While I do have my self-learned self-hosted knowledge, I’m not an IT guy, so I may be mistaken here and there. However, I can give you a diagram on How it works on my setup right now and also gift you a nice ebook to help you setup your mini-CA for your lan :)

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- brokenlcd@feddit.it ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Don’t worry. Lemmy is asynchronous after all. Instant responses aren’t expected. Plus. I know life gets in the way :-).
  
  It was basically a misconception I had about how the homelab router would route the connection
  
  Basically with pihole set up. It routes servo.internal to 192.168.1.y, the IP of the homelab router. So when a machine from the inside of the homelab. On 10.0.0.*, connects to the server. It will refer to it via the 192.168.1.y IP of the router.
  
  The misconception was that I thought all the traffic was going to bounce between the homelab router and the home router. Going through the horrendously slow LAN cable that connects them and crippling the bandwidth between 10.0.0.* machines and the server.
  
  I wanted to setup another pihole server for inside of the homelab. So it would directly connect to the server on it’s 10.0.0.* address instead of the 192.168.1.y. And not go and bounce needlessly between the two routers.
  
  But apparently the homelab router realizes he’s speaking to itself. And routes the data directly to the server. Without passing though the home router and the slower Ethernet. So the issue is nonexistent, and I can use one pihole instance with 192.168.1.y for the server without issue. (Thanks to darkan15 for explaining that).
  
  While I do have my self-learned self-hosted knowledge, I’m not an IT guy, so I may be mistaken here and there.
  
  I think most of us are in a similar situation. Hell. I weld for a living atm :-P.
  
  However, I can give you a diagram on How it works on my setup right now and also gift you a nice ebook to help you setup your mini-CA for your lan :
  
  The diagram would be useful. Considering that rn I’m losing my mind between man pages.
  
  As for the book… I can’t accept. Just give me the name/ISBN and I’ll provide myself. Still. Thanks for the offer.
  
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  - N0x0n@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    (Thanks to darkan15 for explaining that).
    
    I have to look at his answer to have a better understanding :P
    
    The diagram would be useful. Considering that rn I’m losing my mind between man pages.
    
    I’m working on it right now :) I’m a bit overwhelmed with my own LAN setup, and trying to get some feedback from other users :P
    
    As for the book… I can’t accept. Just give me the name/ISBN and I’ll provide myself. Still. Thanks for the offer.
    
    Good. If you have the money to spare please pay for it otherwise you know the drill :) (Myself I’m not able to pay the author so it’s kinda hypocrite on my end… But doing some publicity is also some kind of help I guess?)
    
    Demystifying Cryptography with OpenSSL 3 . 0 by Alexei Khlebnikov <packt>
    
    ISBN: 978-1-80056-034-5
    
    It’s very well written, even as a non-native it was easy to follow :). However, let me give you something along the road, something that will save you hours of looking around the web :) !
    
    Part 5, Chapter 12: Running a mini-CA is the part you’re interested in and that’s the part I used to create my server certificates.
    
    HOWEVER: When he generates the private keys, he uses the ED448 algorithm, which is not going to work for SSL certificates because not a single browser accepts them right now (same thing goes for Curve25519). Long story short, If you don’t want to depend on NIST curves (NSA) fall back to RSA in your homelab ! If you are interested in that story go to p123:
    
    Brainpool curves are proposed by the Brainpool workgroup, a group of cryptographers that were dissatisfied with NIST curves because **NIST curves were not verifiably randomly generated, so they may have intentionally or accidentally weak security. **
    
    Here is a working example for your certificates:
    
    Book:
    
    $ mkdir private $ chmod 0700 private $ openssl genpkey \     -algorithm ED448 \     -out private/root_keypair.pem
    
    But should be:
    
    $ mkdir private $ chmod 0700 private $ openssl genpkey \     -algorithm RSA \     -out private/root_keypair.pem
    
    You have to use RSA or whatever curve you prefer but accepted by your browser for EVERY key you generate !
    
    Other than that, it’s a great reading book :) And good study material for cryptography introduction !
    
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    brokenlcd@feddit.it ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    i’m not sure if it’s equivalent. but in the meantime i have cobbled up a series of commands from various forums to do the whole process, and i came up with the following openssl commands.
    
    openssl genrsa -out servorootCA.key 4096 openssl req -x509 -new -nodes -key servorootCA.key -sha256 -days 3650 -out servorootCA.pem openssl genrsa -out star.servo.internal.key 4096 openssl req -new -key star.servo.internal.key -out star.servo.internal.csr openssl x509 -req -in star.servo.internal.csr -CA servorootCA.pem -CAkey servorootCA.key -CAcreateserial -out star.servo.internal.crt -days 3650 -sha256 -extfile openssl.cnf -extensions v3_req
    
    with only the crt and key files on the server, while the rest is on a usb stick for keeping them out of the way.
    
    hopefully it’s the same. though i’ll still go through the book out of curiosity… and come to think of it. i do also need to setup calibre :-).
    
    thanks for everything. i’ll have to update the post with the full solution after i’m done, since it turned out to be a lot more messy than anticipated…
    
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darkan15@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Do yourself a favor and use the default ports for HTTP(80), HTTPS(443) or DNS(53)

That way, you can do URLs like app1.home.internal and app2.home.internal without having to add ports on anything outside the reverse proxy.

You could run only one DNS on the laptop connected to Router A (External, connected to internet), and point the domain to Router B (Internal, Connected to Router A, has a WAN IP of 192.168.0.y and Internal IP of 10.0.0.1), redirect for example the domain home.internal or home.lan (recommend better home.internal as it is the intended one to use by convention), to the 192.168.0.y IP, and it will redirect all devices to the server by port forwarding.

If Router B has Port Forwarding of Ports 80 and 443 to the Server 10.0.0.114 all the request are going to reach, no matter the LAN they are from. The devices connected to router A will reach the server thanks to port forwarding, and the devices on Router B can reach anything connected to Router A Network 192.168.0.*, they will make an extra hop but still reach.

Both routers would have to point the primary DNS to the Laptop IP 192.168.0.x (should be a static IP), and secondary to either Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 or Google 8.8.8.8.

That setup would be dependent on having the laptop or another device always turned ON and connected to Router A network to have that DNS working, you could run a second DNS on the server for only the 10.0.0.* LAN, but that would not be reachable from Router A or the Laptop, or any device on that outer LAN, only for devices directly connected to Router B, and the only change would be to change the primary DNS on Router B to the Server IP 10.0.0.114 to use that secondary DNS.

Lots of information, be sure to read slowly and separate steps to handle them one by one, but this should be the final setup, considering the information you have given.

You should be able to setup the certificates and the reverse proxy using subdomains without much trouble, only using IP:PORT on the reverse proxy.

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- brokenlcd@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I think I’ll do this with one modification. I’ll make nginx serve the landing page with the subdomains when computers from router A try to access. ( by telling nginx to serve the page with the subdomains when contacted by 10.0.0.1) while I’ll serve another landing page that bypasses the proxy, by giving the direct 10.0.0.* IP of the server with the port, for computers inside router B .
  
  Mostly since the Ethernet between router a and b is old. And limits transfers to 10Mbps. So I’d be handicapping computers inside router B by looping back. Especially since everything inside router B is supposed to be safe. And they’ll be the ones transferring most of the data to it.
  
  Thanks for the breakdown. It genuinely helped in understanding the Daedalus-worthy path the connections need to take. I’ll update the post with my final solution and config once I make it work.
  
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  - darkan15@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    If you decide on doing the secondary DNS on the server on Router B network, there is no need to loop back, as the secondary DNS will maintain domain lookup and the requests on 10.0.0.x all internal to Router B network.
    
    You can still decide to put rules on the reverse proxy if the origin IP is from 192.168.0.x if you see the need to differentiate traffic.
    
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    brokenlcd@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I think I didn’t explain myself the right way.
    
    Computers from inside of Router B will access the server via it’s IP. Nginx will only serve an HTML file with the links. Basically acting as a bookmark page for the IP:port combos. While anything from Router A will receive a landing page that has the domain name, that will be resolved by pihole, exposed to the machines on Router A as an open port on router b`
    
    So basically the DNS will only be used on machines from Router A, and the rules on nginx are just to give links to the reverse proxy if the machine is from router A (I.e. the connection is coming from 10.0.0.1 from the server’s POV), or the page with the raw IP of the server+ port of the service.
    
    router A is Unfortunately junk from my ISP, and it doesn’t allow me to change the DNS. So I’ll just add Router B` ( and thus, the pihole instance that’s on the server) as a primary dns, and an external one as a secondary DNS as fallback.
    
    If you decide on doing the secondary local DNS on the server on Router B network, there is no need to loop back, as that DNS will maintain domain lookup and the requests on 10.0.0.x all internal to Router B network
    
    Wouldn’t this link to the 192.168.0.y address of router B pass through router A, and loop back to router B, routing through the slower cable? Or is the router smart enough to realize he’s just talking to itself and just cut out `router A from the traffic?
    
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