So I am going to start a locally hosted minecraft server soon, and because port forwarding is not an option with my ISP I’ve been experimenting with different tunneling solutions. I started boring proxy on my regular pc to see how it works, I skipped entering my email on setup, selected TakingNames for the admin domain, and the link/qr code it provided did not work. upon visiting the site would only give the error “Missing code_challenge param” which I have no clue what to do about. I sampled other commands/options in boringproxy which I can’t exactly remember then I closed the program in my terminal. However, upon testing with ncat the subdomain provided by takingnames.io is exposing all listening ports on my pc to the internet, which I do not want. I have tried restarting my pc but that doesnt work, boringproxy is executed on startup apparently.
Where I can actually kill boringproxy and how do I disable it on startup? I’m on debian 12. probably also worth mentioning that I have no idea how the takingnames subdomain works, maybe I’m misunderstanding what it’s doing?
TakingNames isn’t doing any forwarding. All it does is point a DNS name to an IP address. This can tell others where to find your services by looking up the domain, but it doesn’t open any additional ports or anything. All the forwarding/tunneling is done by boringproxy.
Unless you set it up as a service, boringproxy has no way to autostart itself, so it shouldn’t be running. Are you sure the boringproxy process is running?
Feel free to DM me with your TakingNames subdomain and I might be able to help more.
PS - The reason the QR/link failed is because boringproxy doesn’t support the latest version of TakingNames. I think very few people have ever used the integration. I’m slowly working on a replacement for boringproxy that will have better support for TN.
So the process definitely wasnt running, which makes sense because I checked everything with ss/ps and didn’t see anything related to boringproxy. I know this for sure cause i reinstalled my OS and the problem persisted. I also know its related to my powerline adapter somehow, because after setting up the server and plugging the ethernet cable that I used on my main PC into the server, it was exposing all listening ports to the internet. Is it possible for boringproxy to have modified my router settings? If not, how is it possible for ports to be forwarded to the internet without changing router settings?
I will say that this isnt really a problem anymore since I have set up my minecraft server and it works as intended with users connecting directly via the IP address, but I really wanna figure out how this is possible.
It shouldn’t be possible for boringproxy to modify your router settings. Are you able to manually change the settings in your router to stop forwarding the ports? It almost sounds like your machine might be on a DMZ, so maybe check that out too.
I reset my router recently and it changed the server’s IP and stopped the auto port forwarding. I’m not familiar with DMZ networks and the minimal research i did makes me think thats not possible because its just my home network. The only theory I have after checking router settings and seeing random PF rules unrelated to my server activities is my PC was somehow using UPnP to automatically forward the ports. I was unable to reproduce the bug after resetting my router, only trying because I honestly wanted it back to avoid using tunneling (my router’s default gateway is awful and any PF rules added are not applied).