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Tunneling Minecraft Server TCP/UDP Geyser with Nginx

After setting up the VPS and configuring Tailscale. Ensure hosts are connectible via ping <tailscale-ip>.

Nginx

sudo apt install nginx # Install Nginx

Change default port to listen to 81 (this is not needed if another reverse proxy is installed or needed). Edit the listen 80 to listen 81. The line after is not relevant if not using IPv6. In the case of Oracle Cloud, only IPv4 is used.
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default


server {
        listen 81 default_server;
        listen [::]:81 default_server;

Configuration

Edit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf add these these stream lines

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf


stream {
     server {
           listen 25565;
           proxy_pass <tailscale_ip>:25565;
    }
    server {
           listen 19132 udp;
           proxy_pass <tailscale_ip>:19132;
    }
}

  • it is also possible to add 25565 udp

Reload nginx if required.

sudo service reload nginx

Firewall

Allow firewall connection. First ensure firewall-cmd is installed. If not, install the package firewalld.

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port 19132/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port 19132/udp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port 25565/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port 25565/udp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Results

In Minecraft client, by typing the public IP address of the Oracle Cloud it will connect. It’s also an option to use Duckdns to make the cloud IP address more recognizable.

The server address is permanent and unchanging.

The performance depends on the location of VPS. There will be significant loss in responsiveness if the tunnel VPS is far away from the host server.

In this example, the host server is in Vancouver while the VPS is located in Toronto (3500/7000km). The round-trip to connect to the tunneled server added 150ms of latency (from Minecraft mobile app), the speed difference is also visualized in the image above. There is no difference between the /tps command as in both cases it’s 20 all around.

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