Hello there. I am thinking of buying some components and building my own dedicated server which I will have in my home. This server will run various programs, as well as Minecraft servers. Now, these Minecraft servers are servers that I will be playing in with my friends, so even if my IP gets exposed, it won’t be a big issue.
Of course, when telling others to join, you could give them your IP, or you could buy a domain and link it to your IP. This is something that I am thinking of doing, but I do not like the idea of having a domain name linked directly to my home IP as someone could use it to track my home IP.
This is where reverse proxies come in place. I don’t know much of it, but I heard that reverse proxies are, like their name, reverse proxies, they take traffic and redirect it to the server, and vise versa, while masking the destination IP. This would be ideal for my use case, but my question to you is if this is even possible. Is it possible to set up a reverse proxy so that my URL directs to the proxy, and then the proxy directs to the server? Is it possible to mask my home IP address using a reverse proxy, or will it still be visible? If I were to implement a reverse proxy, would it cause any issues when hosting websites or Minecraft servers?
I unfortunately do not know that much about reverse proxies and home servers, which is why I am asking here. Although this isn’t part of my original questions, and you by no means need to answer it, could I also ask what the cost of having a reverse proxy might be (since you have to externally host it)? That is all. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Thank you for your time and help, they are truly appreciated.
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Where does the fear of exposing your IP address come from? (It’s common here, not just you). An IP address is meaningless by itself. All it reveals about you is “customer of ISP located within 50 miles of some city/town”.
Safest is probably Cloudflare Tunnels. Similar to something like Tailscale, but Cloudflare provides the Internet facing IP and all their protections. Problem is video streaming is against the TOS for Cloudflare free accounts. So that leaves out Plex type servers.
Next solution is to run a reverse proxy on a VPS and link the VPS to your home network via Tailscale. That away you don’t have to open any ports on your home connection.
Is there a guide or more info on this? I’ve got a couple services behind a reverse proxy (jellyfin etc) and I host a domain on a vm through digital ocean. I use Proxmox and I’ve set up tailscale but not sure how to integrate it all in the way you describe.
You mean the Tailscale part? If so, it is easy. Just install Tailscale on your VM and allow communication between the VM and your Proxmox Tailscale node with the ACL page on your Tailscale account. Make the Proxmox Tailscale node a subnet router or install Tailscale on the VM/Docker of each service.
Awesome! Going to mess with this later today. Thank you!
There’s no need to do all that. A reverse proxy could be hosted on your own house, it’s just a simple “control point” in front of all your equipment. It even could be a VM or container in front of your infra. But a simpler approach it’s to simply set up a vpn like zerotier/wireguard/cloudflared, and give access to your friends to just access the private IP you want. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great thing to learn about reverse proxies (I’d start learning how to do it using nginx if you ask), but sometimes you need to have a proper reason and not overengineering stuff.
Thank you for the reply! Looking at the other discussions on this comment section, it looks like a VPN would do the trick. A reverse proxy might be needed to route the subdomains though.