I want to move away from Cloudflare tunnels, so I rented a cheap VPS from Hetzner and tried to follow this guide. Unfortunately, the WireGuard setup didn’t work. I’m trying to forward all traffic from the VPS to my homeserver and vice versa. Are there any other ways to solve this issue?

VPS Info:

OS: Debian 12

Architecture: ARM64 / aarch64

RAM: 4 GB

Traffic: 20 TB

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    2•9 months ago

    What do you mean with “clear out iptables completely”? Should I remove the iptables package with sudo apt remove iptables?

    • Admiral PatrickEnglish
      3•9 months ago

      I believe iptables --flush should clear out any entries you’ve made. You can also reboot and clear them (unless you’ve got scripts bound to your interface up/down config that adds rules).

      Basically just need to get any custom iptables rules you made out of there and then re-implement any FW rules with ufw

      You can still use iptables alongside UFW, but I only use those for more complex things like port forwarding, masquerading, etc.

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        2•9 months ago

        Alright, I switched to ufw and… it’s still not working. sigh

        Should we just try something completely different? WireGuard doesn’t seem to be working on my VPS. Someone in the comments mentioned tunneling via SSH, sounds interesting.

        • Admiral PatrickEnglish
          3•9 months ago

          That would work, but I’ve noticed performance isn’t as good as a UDP VPN that uses the kernel’s tun module. OpenVPN is also an option, but it’s a LOT more involved to configure (I used to run it before Wireguard existed).

          The oddest part is you can’t get a netcat message through. That implies firewall somewhere.

          What is the output of your ufw status ?

          • @[email protected]OPEnglish
            2•9 months ago

            I’ve added some different ports for the future, but this is my ufw status:

            Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
OpenSSH                    ALLOW       Anywhere                  
51820                      ALLOW       Anywhere                  
2333                       ALLOW       Anywhere                  
80                         ALLOW       Anywhere                  
81                         ALLOW       Anywhere                  
443                        ALLOW       Anywhere                  
80/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere                  
OpenSSH (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
51820 (v6)                 ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
2333 (v6)                  ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
80 (v6)                    ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
81 (v6)                    ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
443 (v6)                   ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             
80/tcp (v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
            • Admiral PatrickEnglish
              1•9 months ago

              I can’t recall if ufw opens both TCP and UDP or just TCP by default.

              Try explicitly allowing 51820/udp with ufw allow 51820/udp

              • @[email protected]OPEnglish
                2•9 months ago

                I’ve added the firewall rule and it still says no port[s] to connect to whenever I run echo "Testing" | nc -u SERVER_IP -p 51820. I feel like you’re trying to stay on a sinking ship, so I would suggest to try another method to see if we even can get the whole “bypass CGNAT with a VPS” thing to work at all.

                Update: I’ve tried setting up SSH tunneling instead and it STILL doesn’t work. I contacted Hetzner support about this issue and I’m hoping that they can resolve the firewall issues that I’m having.