How to use a RPI to do port forwarding?

Question

I have a bunch of RPI's running as web-servers at home. I can connect to one of my RPI's(RPI-1) via VPN and it can see the other RPI's on the LAN. From my VPN connection I can see the website hosted on RPI-1 but not the other RPI's websites(Because they are on the LAN and not connected on the VPN).

Is there a way that I can use RPI-1 to do port forwarding? Making RPI-1:9000 point to one of the other RPI's on the LAN?

Answer 1

You can either

• use iptables (which should be preinstalled on most Linux distributions) to do actual port forwarding (i.e. make rpi2's webserver accessible via http://rpi1:2000/ or some other port of your choice) or

• use the webserver on rpi1 as a reverse proxy to make rpi2 accessible via a (virtual) directory like http://rpi1/rpi2/. The configuration required for that depends on what webserver software is doing the proxying (in this case, the one on rpi1); e.g. for Apache:

  ProxyRequests Off
  ProxyPreserveHost On
  <Proxy *>
      Order deny,allow
      Allow from all
  </Proxy>
  ProxyPass /rpi2/ http://rpi2/
  ProxyPassReverse /rpi2/ http://rpi2/