Hello everyone,
I am trying to configure a reverse proxy with Mikrotik (rb3011 serving as a router) and HAProxy (intended for use as a reverse proxy). In essence, the goal is to create a list of blocked websites where a user on the local network, if attempting to access any of these sites, will be redirected to a local page. That part is okay, I wrote it just as an introduction for you to understand the context.
I’m having trouble connecting Mikrotik with the VM where HAProxy is located. I tried adding a parent proxy and its port in IP → Web Proxy, but I’m not sure if that’s all that’s needed. I apologize if this is a simple matter, I just can’t figure it out based on the documentation.
When I connect in this way and run tcpdump on port 80 (where HAProxy is listening) and try to open www.google.com on the computer connected to Mikrotik, for which I set up a redirect to a local IP address, the request doesn’t reach the HAProxy VM at all.
I know the easiest solution is to redirect the hostname to a local IP address on the DNS server, but DNS can be easily overridden, so I wanted to handle it at the IP level.
Initially, I tried to do everything on Mikrotik, added a list of blocked sites in layer7, created a mangle rule to extract IP addresses from that list, and set up redirection to a local IP within NAT. However, I didn’t consider that many websites use HSTS, making it impractical to redirect all requests in that way.
Thanks in advance to anyone who have any idea.
