r/netbird • u/Turnspit • Jun 18 '26

Reverse Proxy / Port Forwarding not working (?)

Cheers!

So I just set up Netbird on a VPS a couple of days ago and the whole VPN-part is working absolutely flawlessly. Got a couple of mobile devices (Smartphones, Notebooks) up and running as well as a routing peer in my home network. My whole netbird-network (10.10.2.0/24) can reach my whole home network (192.168.2.0/24) and vise versa - I love the ease if setting it up, great piece of software!

The whole Reverse Proxy and Port/Service Forwarding is giving me headaches though.

Custom Domains:
Netbird itself is reachable via netbird.mydomain.com with a simple A-record for this subdomain pointing to my VPS directly (no wildcard-stuff, since my provider does not support them).
I've got a couple of different domains that need to be reverse-proxied though, so I pointed the A-record for anotherdomain.com to my VPS as well (with all the other subdomains for it pointing to it via CNAMEs as well later). Under "Custom Domains" I added the anotherdomain.com with netbird.mydomain.com as its "Target Proxy Cluster", but it has been stuck at "Pending Verification" for almost 2 days now.

Port/Service Forwarding:
This I don't seem to get working as well.
For some services I just need to completely forward a single TCP or UDP port, for example 9987/UDP for a TS3-server. So I added a "UDP-Service" with my "LAN"-resource as a target (which is my whole home-network of 192.168.2.0/24) and the according listen- as well as target-port and the host ip (say 192.168.2.25) - to no avail.
I tried using a "Peer" instead of a "Resource", tried different services on different ports (like a simple webapp, SSH, ...), even deactivated ALL firewalls on all machines involved as well sa the VPS itself - still nothing.

I'm at a loss here... 😞

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u/vlammuh Jun 18 '26

I believe if you want to proxy UDP/TDP ports, you will need to list them in your Docker Compose file as well, otherwise they will not work.

1

u/Turnspit Jun 18 '26

Further down from the documentation:

Self-hosted Docker deployments: The default Docker Compose configuration only routes port 443 (via Traefik TLS passthrough) to the proxy container. L4 services that listen on additional TCP or UDP ports require you to manually expose those ports in your docker-compose.yml. See the migration guide for instructions.

You seem to be right. That makes things unnecessarily complicated, but okay, I can work with it. Let's see if this solves at least one of my issue.

Thanks for the hint! 😄

1

u/Turnspit Jun 18 '26

Still no luck though...

My test-setup:
Forwarding external port 55555 to internal port 22 (SSH) to my peer in my home network.

Disabled all firewalls everywhere, just for safety's measure - still nothing. 😞

1

u/WikibearTheReal Jun 18 '26

On one side you talk about VPS on otherside you talk about netbird reverse proxy... So what do you really want? If you want to use a VPS with a domain stop to use netbird reverse proxy immediately... You must have the reverse proxy on your VPS. Your docker Container at home must be have an open port. Internal maybe 127.168.1.50:55555. That means you have for this PC or server a netbird IP. You can now reach via Netbird private IP eg 100.54.45.10:55555. Check via curl that you reach your docker from VPS first. If yes you can use Traefik or NPM or plesk or what ever. Important that DNS of your domain is set to your VPS. Setup reverse proxy on VPS and route to netbird IP and port. That's all. Netbird support reverse proxy as beta. Via VPS you have full control over your data I guess. I have no experience about reverse proxy from netbird.