I’ve been trying to migrate my services over to rootless Podman containers for a while now and I keep running into weird issues that always make me go back to rootful. This past weekend I almost had it all working until I realized that my reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager) wasn’t passing the real source IP of client requests down to my other containers. This meant that all my containers were seeing requests coming solely from the IP address of the reverse proxy container, which breaks things like Nextcloud brute force protection, etc. It’s apparently due to this Podman bug: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/8193
This is the last step before I can finally switch to rootless, so it makes me wonder what all you self-hosters out there are doing with your rootless setups. I can’t be the only one running into this issue right?
If anyone’s curious, my setup consists of several docker-compose files, each handling a different service. Each service has its own dedicated Podman network, but only the proxy container connects to all of them to serve outside requests. This way each service is separated from each other and the only ingress from the outside is via the proxy container. I can also easily have duplicate instances of the same service without having to worry about port collisions, etc. Not being able to see real client IP really sucks in this situation.
I struggled with this same problem for a long time before finding a solution. I really didn’t want to give up and run my reverse proxy (Traefik in my case) on the host, because then I’d lose out on all the automatic container discovery and routing. But I really needed true client IPs to get passed through for downstream service consumption.
So what I ended up doing was installing only HAProxy on the host, configuring it to proxy all traffic to my containerized reverse proxy via Proxy Protocol (which includes original client IPs!) instead of HTTPS. Then I configured my reverse proxy to expect (and trust) Proxy Protocol traffic from the host. This allows the reverse proxy to receive original client IPs while still terminating HTTPS. And then it can pass everything to downstream containerized services as needed.
I tried several of the other options mentioned in this thread and never got them working. Proxy Protocol was the only thing that ever did. The main downside is there is another moving part (HAProxy) added to the mix, and it does need to be on the host. But in my case, that’s a small price to pay for working client IPs.
More at: https://www.haproxy.com/blog/use-the-proxy-protocol-to-preserve-a-clients-ip-address
Interesting solution! Thanks for the info. Seems like Nginx Proxy Manager doesn’t support Proxy Protocol. Lmao, the world seems to be constantly pushing me towards Traefik all the time 🤣
That’s unfortunate about NPM and Proxy Protocol, because plain ol’ nginx does support it.
I hear you about Traefik… I originally came from nginx-proxy (not to be confused with NPM), and it had pretty clunky configuration especially with containers, which is how I ended up moving to Traefik… which is not without its own challenges.
Anyway, I hope you find a solution that works for your stack.