https://spartanhost.org/ owner is super chill will make custom spec deployments and they actually have a really nice management panels with nice easy custom iso support

One end is a local VPS with insanely good peering pretty much round the damn world, other end is my opnsense router. I actually pass a block of ipv6 through the vpn and my router hands it out to devices which is a nice little bonus

That sounds like a lack of port forwarding on at least one side. Ensure the vpn port is properly open on both sides. There is also an option you can add to the wireguard config for keepalive set it to something like 1min

I feel like im missing something here. This is pretty trivial and the comments i see are over complicating the hell outta everything. All you need is your VPN tunnel working. Personally i use wireguard for this. Then you just use nginx as the reverse proxy it talks to services on the other side of the VPN.

The nginx server config looks like

server { listen 443 quic; listen [::]:443 quic; listen 443 ssl; listen [::]:443 ssl; server_name my.domain.tld; http2 on; http3 on; quic_gso on; tcp_nodelay on; error_log /var/log/nginx/jellyfin.access.log; ssl_certificate /path/to/ssl/fullchain.pem; ssl_certificate_key /path/to/ssl/privkey.pem; ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3; add_header Alt-Svc ‘h3=“:$server_port”; ma=86400’; add_header x-quic ‘h3’; add_header Alt-Svc ‘h3-29=“:$server_port”’;

location / {
    proxy_pass http://10.159.4.12:8096/;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forward-Proto http;
    proxy_set_header X-Nginx-Proxy true;
}

}

I have no idea how to do the proper code block i guess so have a paste from my reverse proxy hosted pastebin lol https://paste.kitsuna.net/upload/snail-seal-pig