BB's Random Stuff

Pound web proxy

On my home network, I've got several machines running, with various functions. I've got my gateway/mail/web server, desktops, a Dreambox satellite receiver, and a linux PVR box running MythTV and VDR. Some of my internal machines are running web servers of their own - in particular the VDR box and my dreambox sat receiver have web servers through which program schedules can be made with a web browser from anywhere.

However, having a static single IP address means that these machines aren't reachable from the outside through my NAT gateway, unless I put in some port forwarding. I did this for a while, forwarding unused TCP ports to the web servers on the inside, but it's rather messy.

I found a solution at last, and it uses Pound, a very simple application which proxies incoming HTTP requests, much like any other reverse proxy solution, and forwards them onto different machines depending on attributes in the Host header. With this, I can now make different virtual hosts, and they all get redirected to the right machine and right port number, all from one tcp port on a single IP address.

With this single binary and a very small (10 line) config file, I now have hostA.cactii.net going to one box, hostB.cactii.net to another box, etc. A default directive catches all other Host headers to my main server.