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’ve solved this on my side with socket activation, which besides giving out the real IP, also has native network performance since it fully skips slirp4netns. You could even set nginx’s network to none, but since I also use named networks for internal container DNS, so I kept network set.
I’ve built my own Nginx image and I’m using Quadlets instead of Compose, so my config is as easy as it gets, the socket file is something like this:
[Unit] Description=container-nginx [Socket] BindIPv6Only=both ListenStream=443 [Install] WantedBy=sockets.targetAnd the quadlet file for NGINX goes like this for me:
[Unit] Description=Web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. Requires=nginx.socket After=nginx.socket [Container] Image=localhost/nginx:latest AutoUpdate=local Volume=/data/containers/nginx/conf.d:/etc/nginx/conf.d:Z Volume=/data/containers/nginx/certs:/certs:Z Network=services.network # Socket for systemd Environment="NGINX=3;" [Service] Restart=alwaysIf you check the socket activation link, there are a few other examples, but IMO that’s the easiest setup out of the 5 examples. You could move NGINX out of the compose setup for easiness or adapt examples 3 to 6 (which invoke podman manually). That said, I wanted to use Caddy for easier certificate management, but it doesn’t support socket activation, so this setup kinda hardlocked me to NGINX.
That said, I wanted to use Caddy for easier certificate management, but it doesn’t support socket activation
Damn. This looked like such a promising solution.
I see! So I am assuming you had to configure Nginx specifically to support this? Problem is I love using Nginx Proxy Manager and I am not sure how to change that to use socket activation. Thanks for the info though!
Man, I often wonder whether I should ditch docker-compose. Problem is there’s just so many compose files out there and its super convenient to use those instead of converting them into systemd unit files every time.
Ran into the real ip problem too in prod where we needed ip6 too and the podman version is too old to have anything newer. But running the proxy with network=host and anything behind is listening on 127.0.0.1:x is working well so far. It’s not so elegant as it could be, but it works smoothly.
Yeah, I thought about exposing ports on localhost for all my services just to get around this issue as well, but I lose the network separation, which I find incredibly useful. Thanks for chiming in though!
By running NPM in an unprivileged LXC without docker or podman. I’m surprised to hear that’s been an issue with podman for so long though.
Podman + Caddy does it for me.
You need to adjust the “minimum” port a user can bind. Podman tells you how to do it (or a quick google search).
I am guessing you’re not running Caddy itself in a container? Otherwise you’ll run into the same real IP issue.
I do. If you run caddy with
network_mode: hostor better withnetwork_mode: "slirp4netns:port_handler=slirp4netns"it should work.also adding:
cap_add: - net_admin - net_rawI see. And the rest of your services are all exposed on localhost? Hmm, darn, it really looks like there’s no way to use user-defined networks.
Yes… That is also my understanding.
The issue you linked mentions using
pastawhere it does work. Have you tried that or is it not a solution at all?Pasta is the default, so I am already using it. It seems like for bridge networks, rootlesskit is always used alongside pasta and that’s the source of the problem.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol LXC Linux Containers nginx Popular HTTP server
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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