Hostname based port forwarding?

[ajhalls]

I have a few servers at the office and our ISP is refusing to give us more IP addresses. I was hoping to add another server for a windows Remote Desktop, is there a way to point http://remotedesktop.myoffice.com to the public IP of the router and have it redirect ALL traffic to an internal address?

The reason I ask (other than what I listed above) is because I wanted to put together a server with multiple virtual machines that would each have their own internal IP, but would all be listening on port :80.

I had tried to do it with an F5 and PFSense, but didn't figure it out and hoping this would be easier :)

[franco]

Hi ahjalls,

I think the setup is still the same as pfSense: you need to add a load balancer virtual server that can broker your coming connection from a shared WAN-IP according to host names. I don't know much about the built-in load balancer so I don't know if that's possible. After some quick research it doesn't look like it.

There's also a HAProxy plugin that could achieve the same, but I think it's more complex.

Otherwise, set up a simple port forward to an internal server that serves as a reverse HTTP proxy from there.


Cheers,
Franco

[bartjsmit]

If you are going to use a reverse proxy, you may want to consider encryption for something called 'remote desktop' :)

SNI is your friend: https://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHostsWithSNI

Bart...

[ajhalls]

Thanks Franco. I guess I am not seeing the proper workflow here to get something setup. I can setup a pool to listen and forward to a single port, but I was hoping to forward all ports depending on the hostname request.

Under virtual servers I can only tell it which port and pool to use. When I look at Firewall:Rules, I can select a "WAN address" as the source, not sure if that is an IP address or a hostname, but either way there isn't anywhere to type what what IP or hostname would be.

Bartjsmit, thank you so much, that will solve another problem down the road for me.