Hey! Sorry for the repeating question, I have a very specific question though.
For context, I access my services using a vpn, and that’s been great. However, I’ve been a lot of people mentioning reverse proxies. Are they necessary or more of a convenience thing? I ask because I don’t see something that I cannot do with my current vpn setup.
Thanks!
If you have multiple services, you will need to use a reverse proxy. For instance, let’s say you’re running a website, a document repository, nextcloud for personal cloud, etc. They all listen on port 80 for http and 443 for https. How will you set up port forwarding to all of these servers? That’s where reverse proxy comes in. You can specify specific subdomains and redirect to the correct servers.
You can also do SSL stripping and other stuff using reverse proxy.
But if you’re using only one service and use VPN to connect to your network, you don’t need a reverse proxy.
The services all have different IP addresses. You setup your containers and virtual network to use multiple IP addresses on a single physical interface connection.
192.168.1.100:34000 is Plex
192.168.1.101:80 is Website 192.168.1.102:80 is Website 2
I can turn on my VPN and type any of them into the address bar to access them.