For a POC I want to have 2+ separate instances of Fiddler Proxy running on separate servers and have nginx do the round-robin balancing (or sticky if necessary), the problem I'm running into is as per Telerik each Fiddler instance generates its own root certificate in order to decrypt HTTPS traffic so when the traffics starts going into different servers the client side freaks out and closes the connections. I tried to solve it with sticky session but that still requires me to install all 2+ fiddler root certificates on the client and if I add/remove Fiddler instances I need to manually update all the clients. I've been trying exporting the root certificate from the one (lets say master) instance and import into the other (secondary) instances but it doesn't seem to work. I'm not really a security/certificate expert so I'm not really sure if I'm doing something wrong or this is plain just not possible. I appreciate any help and opportunity to be educated in the matter :-p Thanks!
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I have a webpage and a little game server running on my own machine that is located at my work office.
The problem is that some people can't reach the webpage and game server, because of some network issues. The reasons are not the key, just take it (for almost all my community all things works fine, there just some troubles for a specific group).
So,
I have set up the test Droplet on Digital Ocean, with socks5 proxy installed.
https://github.com/hensly/socks5
And it all worked :) Clients that are restricted to connect directly are just using my proxy server to connect to the webpage or game server.
.
So my questions come up:
How can I limit my proxy to work only with certain IPs? Actually, I need only one IP - the IP of my server-pc, and that's it (the reserved (white) IP and domain name attached to it). Is there a way of such limitation on the proxy side? I just don't want them to use proxy for everything (mostly because there is not an unlimited Bandwidth and it could cost some extra).
Thanks <3
p.s. if you know other, more convenient ways to solve my problem, I'd appreciate it if you share your thoughts.
I have a network load balancer setup on EC2 and everything works fine, though I'd like to enable http2 to get better performance and scores from auditing tools (eg. lighthouse).
My setup is Nginx on Ubuntu, the load balancer only has 2 instances to point to.
When I setup the listener to use http2, it doesn't work even though nginx and everything on the instances is setup properly. Is it because I'm using certificate manager and that there's no way for the balancer to use the certificate if it's installed through there?
Thanks a lot!
If someone comes across this, I ended up being able to solve the issue recently.
My problem was that I needed to install a self-issued certificate on both of my EC2 instances. That enables the back-and-forth between the load balancer to be secured and, in turn, it allows the load balancer to reply with the http2 headers signaling that it's available. For some reason, I thought that this was already configured, but it wasn't.
Now everything works fine!
Wondering if we can share session data between two servers (running different code) behind an Nginx reverse proxy.
To be precise, we have a legacy app in PHP running on an apache server. We are updating some functionality and hosting only that functionality on a separate server (nginx). Both apps update the same DB.
nginX uses load balancing/ reverse proxy URL rewritting techniques to decide which server to send the client to based on the URL path they use.
So, a person can add items to his virtual basket (held in session) on
the new server application.
He then decides to edit his personal information which is on the other server (Legacy).
Nginx uses it's reverse proxy/load balancing magic to decide which server to send the person to based on where an app is available.
The question is, how can a session created on one app server be available to another app server aswell? is it possible to setup the reverse proxy to store all session data and how. Please point me to the right direction of you can help with google links aswell.
your question has several possible answers. It all depends on the way the application is designed.
A possible scenario would be to keep session information on a database shared among different web heads. In this way the client, once authenticated will retrieve its "session status" regardless which server he is accessing in the final servers cluster backend.
Again, this depends very much on the way the application is/has been designed.
I think there is very little magic you can do on an old legacy application just by configuring the reverse proxy engine.
In the end, sessions are handled by the application server and not the proxy frontend.
I am developing an app (RoR + Heroku) which allows users create their own websites either using my subdomain (pagename.myapp.com) or using their own domain (pagename.com).
An important point of this is that this option is the key of my business: subdomains are the free plans and custom domains are the paid ones. So I have a table where I store the custom domains of each user and check if this page is active (exists and has paid the quota).
For that I need to give users the capability of point their domain to my servers. All we know that Heroku don't recommend the use of DNS A-Records.
Also I would like to abstract as much as possible this feature to being able to switch my infrastructure (Heroku to AWS) in the future without having to ask all my users to change their DNS Zone. Taking this into account, I think that the best option would be run something like an EC2 proxy (using AWS Elastic IP) which give me the ownership of this IP. This proxy I think that should redirect to proxy.myapp.com, and I would resolve the request in the app level.
Due to I didn't find clear information about that, I am not sure if this hypotesis is the best solution and how to setup the proxy (which type of proxy use? Nginx maybe?).
Said that, I would like to ask recommendations/best practices to solve this "common" feature.
Thanks
What you are wanting to do is fairly straight forward to implement. Your assumptions are correct about setting up the proxy. Nginx or haproxy will both work great for this (I personally would use haproxy). Here are some of the gotchas that you will run into though:
Changing the host header at a proxy server can cause the end web application to generate incorrect links. You can use relative paths to fix this, but it requires that the web application developer to be aware of the environment that they are running in.
user connects to www.example.com (proxy server)
proxy server connects to www.realdomain.com (web app)
the web app has a link for a shopping cart. www.realdomain.com/shoppingcart
the end user clicks on the link but the link is www.realdomain.com/shoppingcart instead of www.example.com/shoppingcart
The cost of the host acting as the proxy server. This can spiral out of control really quickly. For example, do you want redundancy, if so how are you planning on implementing that? Do you plan on having ssl termination? If so you will have to increase the CPU count to accommodate the additional load. Do you want to have a secure connection to heroku from your proxy? If you do then you will need to increase the CPU count for that as well. You may have to add additional ram as well depending on the number of concurrent connections.
Heroku also changes their load balancers regularly. This is important because your proxy service will need to reload the config / update the ip addresses of the heroku instances every 60 seconds. In my experience they may change once or twice a day, but the DNS entry that they use has a 60 second TTL. That means that you should make sure that you are capable of updating your config up to every 60 seconds.
My company has been doing something very similar to this for almost a year now. We use haproxy and simply have it reload the config regularly. We have never had an outage or an interruption to our end users. Nginx is also a very good product. It has built in DNS caching so if you go that route you will need to make sure that you configure it correctly so that the DNS cache TTL is 60 seconds.
Will many of your clients want to use your app on their domain apex? E.g. example.com rather than theapp.example.cpm? If not, I would recommend having them CNAME to proxy.myapp.com which CNAMEs to myapp.herokuapp.com. Then, you can update proxy.myapp.com without customer interruption.
If you do need apex or A record support, you would want to set up Nginx as a reverse proxy for your Heroku app. Keep in mind that if you need HTTPS support for client domains, you will need to do some sort of certificate management on your proxy.
I like the answer dtorgo gave and that he mentioned the TLS termination, which many online tutorials on custom domains don't touch at all.
I'll go into more detail on how to implement the custom domains feature for your SaaS while also handling the TLS/HTTPS.
If your customers just CNAME to your domain or create the A record to your IP and you don't handle TLS termination for these custom domains, your app will not support HTTPS, and without it, your app won't work in modern browsers on these custom domains.
You need to set up a TLS termination reverse proxy in front of your webserver. This proxy can be run on a separate machine but you can run it on the same machine as the webserver.
CNAME vs A record
If your customers want to have your app on their subdomain, e.g. app.customer.com they can create a CNAME app.customer.com pointing to your proxy.
If they want to have your app on their root domain, e.g. customer.com then they'll have to create an A record on customer.com pointing to your proxy's IP. Make sure this IP doesn't change, ever!
How to handle TLS termination?
To make TLS termination work, you'll have to issue TLS certificates for these custom domains. You can use Let's Encrypt for that. Your proxy will see the Host header of the incoming request, e.g. app.customer1.com or customer2.com etc., and then it will decide which TLS certificate to use by checking the SNI.
The proxy can be set up to automatically issue and renew certificates for these custom domains. On the first request from a new custom domain, the proxy will see it doesn't have the appropriate certificate. It will ask Let's Encrypt for a new certificate. Let's Encrypt will first issue a challenge to see if you manage the domain, and since the customer already created a CNAME or A record pointing to your proxy, that tells Let's Encrypt you indeed manage the domain, and it will let you issue a certificate for it.
To issue and renew certificates automatically, I'd recommend using Caddyserver, greenlock.js, OpenResty (Nginx).
tl;dr on what happens here;
Caddyserver listens on 443 and 80, it receives requests, issues, and renews certificates automatically, proxies traffic to your backend.
How to handle it on my backend
Your proxy is terminating TLS and proxying requests to your backend. However, your backend doesn't know who is the original customer behind the request. This is why you need to tell your proxy to include additional headers in proxied requests to identify the customer. Just add X-Serve-For: app.customer.com or X-Serve-For: customer2.com or whatever the Host header is of the original request.
Now when you receive the proxied request on the backend, you can read this custom header and you know who is the customer behind the request. You can implement your logic based on that, show data belonging to this customer, etc.
More
Put a load balancer in front of your fleet of proxies for higher availability. You'll also have to use distributed storage for certificates and Let's Encrypt challenges. Use AWS ECS or EBS for automated recovery if something fails, otherwise, you may be waking up in the middle of the night restarting machines, or your proxy manually.
If you need more detail you can DM me on Twitter #dragocrnjac
i'me working on a web server using play framework 2.0, where the login is executed by a android device software we're also making. And are main concern is that we can't find any support for HTTPS in play 2.0. Sense this is a school project we can't aford clouds nor other proxy to solve the HTTPS for us.
Our main problem is the password and email going in plain sight in the request's body, encrypting and decrypting in the mobile device and on the server looks costly in performance and sense HTTPS takes care of this we wanted to avoid it. Is there any way we can use HTTPS to protect the users login data, or any other suggestion.
If not we might have to migrate all are application to another framework, because it wont look good important confidential data going through the internet without encryption.
Historically, I've seen most folks run the Java/Scala application server behind a reverse proxy of some kind. Setting up HTTPS in apache isn't too hard, and then just use ModProxy to send requests internally to your Play application.
Any one of the reverse proxy systems can likely do this, nginx is popular too, and generally has easier configuration than apache, but I've never used it with HTTPS.
The number one reason normally to do this is security. You can't start a Java program as a non privileged user on port 80. If you start your Java program as root running on port 80, then any hole in your application has root privileges! As a result, starting the Java app on another port, then reverse proxy from an web server that can run as a non-priveleged user on port 80.
(*) This is a slightly over-simplified, but a discussion of this weirdness is beyond the scope of this I think.
It's now possible to use Play and https directly. This was added in Play 2.1
Simply start the server with:
JAVA_OPTS=-Dhttps.port=9001 play start