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Port forwarding through a VPS with the help of Wireguard and iptables

Context

Recently I wanted to host a Minecraft server on a network that I can not port forward with. Although this can be done with an SSH tunnel too, I believe Wireguard will give a slightly better performance overall.

I will not be going through Wireguard setup in this page, but I did cover it before here: Wireguard server and peer configuration (Archlinux / Debian / Ubuntu). Instead I will just be going through the iptables portion.

Commands

Add

# iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d 123.123.123.123 --dport 25565 -j DNAT --to 10.123.123.123:25565
# iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp -d 10.123.123.123 --dport 25565 -j ACCEPT
# iptables -t nat -o wg0 -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

Delete

# iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING -p tcp -d 123.123.123.123 --dport 25565 -j DNAT --to 10.123.123.123:25565
# iptables -D FORWARD -p tcp -d 10.123.123.123 --dport 25565 -j ACCEPT
# iptables -t nat -o wg0 -D POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE
  • Change 123.123.123.123 to your external facing server's public IP address
  • Change 10.123.123.123 to the server's Wireguard IP address
  • Change all instances of 25565 to a port you wish to forward
  • Change wg0 to your Wireguard interface name
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