hey folks!
finally starting with my homelab and i have adguard and homer up and running! i am having a couple of issues however, and i haven’t really found much that makes sense to me yet (sorry - super new!):
i’m on ubuntu server FWIW
initially, i could only access the adguard web interface via the ip with the port number - i.e. 10.0.0.1:3000; after i started up Homer, though, i could only access it without the port. not sure this is so much a problem, but i think it may have some impact on my actual problem, which is:
i want to configure domain names for the services on my intranet, so i initially tried to use adguard to do this. my first problem arose when i couldnt type port numbers in the DNS rewrite, so i couldn’t access my homer via DNS because that IP only redirected to my adguard. due to this, i read that possibly setting up nginx proxy manager and creating a reverse proxy would be good practice so that the proxy could divvy up the domain names itself. so i spun that up in docker, but now i can’t start adguard because port 443 is taken by nginx (which i thought could solve this port conflict issue?) - any idea how i can go about this to allow both adguard to run with nginx and help solve my domain name issue with nginx?
i’m just looking for some general direction to help my understanding - definitely don’t want y’all to do homework for me haha; and apologies if these are dumb questions - genuinely just trying to skill up in linux b/c this is the first time i’ve seriously used it
Not dumb questions! All part of the learning process.
A dns entry by nature only points to an ip address, and when you go to that address in a web browser without a port manually specified, your browser will by default connect to port 80 (http) or port 443 (https) on that address.
I’m going to explain using port 80 to start, since you don’t have to setup ssl certificates that way.
Your reverse proxy should be the thing listening on port 80, where it will proxy those requests by hostname (your dns entries) to the ports each other service is listening on. For example, the Adguard web ui should be at port 3000 (its default, I think) instead of 80/443, and in your reverse proxy config you’ll set it up have requests to http:// your-adguard-hostname.yourdomain.tld reverse-proxy to port 3000. Put your other services on other ports (ports in the 8000s are common for this), and have your nginx config point to them by hostname.domain.tld the same way.
Set up that way, when you go to http:// adguard.your-domain.tld in your browser, your request will hit your server on port 80 where your reverse proxy is listening, and your reverse proxy will send it to port 3000 where adguard is listening. You could also go to http:// adguard.your-domain.tld:3000 to bypass the reverse proxy.
As an aside, Adguard will also be listening on port 53 for dns requests, and the dns entries for all of the services you set up will be looked up through that port, not the web proxy.
You can apply the same process to port 443, but it gets more complicated because you need to set up ssl certificates for that. For simplicity, you can set up a single self-signed wildcard certificate for your reverse proxy to use, and you don’t usually need ssl between the reverse proxy and other services on the same server. Your browser will complain about the self-signed certificate, but if it’s all internal it’s okay. Setting up proper certificates for each hostname.domain.tld is a whole other rabbit hole, but great to learn and great to have done.