Using a VPN to connect a remote reverse proxy to lan servers?
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Hi all!
I've been running pfsense plus for about a year or so now, and self host a few things on a proxmox server, and i've been using HAproxy as the frontend of those services which handles TLS offloading and routing the the correct machine/port. Its honestly great. But recently I have been trying to explore the option of instead having a little VPS out in the wild that runs NGINX and will proxy_pass the traffic through to my self hosted machine via some kind of VPN tunnel with pfsense.
(quick side note, as i said HAproxy has been great and works fantastically. the reasons for wanting to change architecture are mostly around wanting to not have to put my DNS entrys to my public ip address because it would be nice to not have literally anyone know my city of residence with a 2 second google search, and partly because i've put a fair bit of effort now into trying to get the access_logs of each machine show the correct IP address instead of the pfsense ip address and i've reached the point where i am just giving up on that usecase working with my HAproxy set. I know its possible, but as an end user, we just get to the point where we have tried following multiple different guides and tutorials and tried all the switches, flags and copy pasting raw config ect and it still doesnt work so i am throwing in the towel on that one)
The main reason for this forum post is to try and get some help from the community about if there is any real difference between the supported VPN's in terms of the specific usecase of having a remote reverse proxy tunnel traffic through to the lan. I have very little experience with this so far, but my quick POC i did, i used OpenVPN and the connection to the remote VPS dropped fairly regularly, and the throughput didn't seem to be great (despite the VPS being within 200ms ping of my location). I fully expect much of those issues were with me, as i said it was a quick POC and i did the bare minimum needed to be able to proxy_pass traffic through. But thats exactly why im trying to get some feedback from the community to understand if there is others out there doing a similar thing, and if there is any general consensus or best practice around vpn tunnels that want to be open 24/7 and have a fair bit of throughput come through it.
any information, links to documentation or discussion would be greatly appreciated!