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I need some help with a networking problem I have been working on for a long time now. I'm pretty sure what I want to do can be done but I don't see any good examples of my situation.

Here is what I want to do.

I have 3 webservers in my house. One for my security cameras, one for my thermastat, and one for my bittorrent client. They are all on seprate IP addresses. I want to be able to access all of them from one external URL/port. My ISP dropps packets from port 80 so that port is out. I can use and access port 443 from just about everywhere. What I'm looking to do is be able to go to my myurl.dnydns.org account URL for all three pages over port 443. So it will look like this.

myurl.dyndns.org:443/camera -- for the camera server
myurl.dyndns.org:443/hvac -- for the thermostat
myurl.dyndns.org:443/bittorrent -- for the bittorrent server

From what I have read I think I can do this with the Squid proxy server setup to do a reverse proxy.

Can anyone show me how to configure everything so that it works the way I want it to?

I will be using the windows version of Squid if it can do it.

Also if you know of another way to do this using XP and free software please let me know.


I had a similar issue with VNC but I found UltraVNC with its proxy repeater fixed that. I'm looking for something like that solution but for websites.

A while back my g/f and I were wanting to network our computers. Hers runs Vista and mine runs XP. I have no desire to move to Vista so after some looking I found a program called Network Magic. I don't know if it will be able to do what you are hoping, but it may help you out.

Cisco Network Magic? I think this was intended for simple network setup for your average user. This would not have anything like what I'm wanting to do. At least I did not see anything in the details.

What I'm wanting to do is far more complex than a simple $50 program to do. I'm guessing software that does what I'm looking for will either be $100+ or free and mostly based on Linux.

Jay, I'm not sure you can do it with reverse proxying... that seems to depend upon changes to the domain itself?

Why only one port? Security reasons? I'd think that it'd save you a lot of time/hassle by going to 3 ports, one for each PC. I can look into it when I'm at work tomorrow, that's where most of my resources of that nature are.

Second question: What kind of internet/home router setup do you have?

I need to use the one port because my ISP blocks port 80 and work, hotels, other wifi access points block just about everything else. The one port I have found that works just about everywhere is port 443 which is from my understanding is used by https. I'm currently port forwarding on a few open ports I found at work but some of the ports arnt open other places. Ports like 81 and 8080.

I have a cable modem which goes into an XP box setup to share the internet connection. From there the other computers and devices are hooked up to a switch.

Jay, I'm not sure what solution you want to do but I use the same port 443 with an SSH daemon listening. If you have port forwarding enabled you can simply establish an SSH connection to the server and map localhost ports to the separate machines. Send me a PM if you want specific directions on how to do this as I've been doing it for a decade now (and yes, there are SSH servers which work on XP and Vista and will give the same functionality -- just use Putty on your localhost to get the connection going).

Well I think I found a solution using at32 Reverse proxy http://www.at32.com/doc/rproxy.htm

The only issue with it is that I could not get myurl.dyndns.org:443/hvac to work. The only way I got it to work was to setup multiple domains like myurl2.dyndns.org:443. I could setup wild cards with dyndns.org but I would have to pay a yearly fee.

So I think I have it working. I'll have to try it from work when I get there. I'm going to see if I can create my own subdomains with wild cards with my web host so I can use my own domain for the URL. I hope to be able to point something like servername.home.jaygroh.com to my dyndns.org URL and still have it work right.

Could you unify them into one server?

No. My thermostat has a built in web server. My camera server is also my storage server and NAT and has too much of a load for anything else.

I just setup some CNAME with my domain name host and it seems to be working like I want it to with my own domain name. Now I just have to try it all from work.

I believe I have everything working the way I want now. I created a subdomain of home.jaygroh.com and created CNAME entries for servername.home.jaygroh.com pointed to myurl.dyndns.org. The at32 Reverse Proxy software looks at the servername.home.jaygroh.com URL on port 443 and forwards the information to the right server.

Its pretty easy once you know what to look for. Which is always my problem since I never know what to look for.