Difficulty with instillation

[nortoneye]

Having trouble installing railpro assistant on my windows 10 laptop.  Talked to Tim-removed McAfferty (SIC) security, told Windows Defender to allow through firewall and added railpro assistant to allowed programs in Windows defender.  Install proceeds until I get to the progress bar and nothing happens until I get an error message of "unable to download files from Ring Engineering"  I have tried run as administrator also.  Any ideas??

jim

[TwinStar]

Are you trying on a home non-satellite network?

[nortoneye]

No, l think I have isolated the problem to a backup program.  I have tried everything Tim suggested. Will try a work around and see if this works

Thanks for the reply

[William Brillinger]

You might be suffering form the UDP problem.

One of our group members (the other Tim) built a suite of tools to help diagnose this.

https://rpug.pdc.ca/index.php/topic,706.0.html

Hopefully he will chime in here if your backup program isn't the issue.

[nortoneye]

It has to be my ISP, at my son's home with a different ISP, no problem.  At my home, cannot connect.   I did the port 80 test and it;s open.  Will contact them today.  If anyone has other ideas, chime in.

jim

[nortoneye]

So the answer was that my ISP does not automatically assign a "static IP" and without this I could not connect with RP.  Doing this solved the issue-not sure if this will come up for anyone else, but that was my problem.


jim

[G8B4Life]

That is odd. Having a static IP address is definitely not a requirement for connecting to RE's file server. I'd been connecting to RE's file server with a dynamic IP address long before residential static IP addresses became the norm. It sound's like your ISP hasn't configured their servers properly. As it goes a static IP address is not usually handed out to residential customers unless they have VOIP or ask for it, usually providing a good reason however, I'm happy to see it fixed your issue and I've filed the report away in my mind for future use.

I did the port 80 test and it;s open.

Did you use the UDP Test tool to check?

- Tim

[nortoneye]

i did use the tool to test port 80, it indicated it was open, the ISP folks said it was not open on their router, so they reconfigured....the ISP support folks mentioned something about cable based internet which my son has (where I could connect)...cost me an extra 10 bucks per month to have a static IP assigned...kinda frustrating.  since RE does not require a static IP, I may see if port 80 was the entire problem and see if I can save the 10 bucks

[G8B4Life]

I'm glad to see someone got some use of the tool.

i did use the tool to test port 80, it indicated it was open, the ISP folks said it was not open on their router, so they reconfigured

There's a couple of ways to read what they said. When they said "their router" they could have meant the CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) router if they supplied one to you for your internet (many ISP's can remotely configure CPE that they have supplied) or most likely they could have meant the router at their end. Without knowing which tests in the test tool you ran and how you ran them there's a couple of things that could be going on.

1. Your ISP blocks inbound port 80 traffic.
2. Your ISP uses carrier grade NAT (Network Address Translation) and blocks inbound port 80 traffic.

By giving you a static IP address (sometimes called a public IP address in the case of point 2) what this allows them to do is to open the port up just for you and nobody else.

You can talk to your ISP again and ask them if you do need the static IP address or not. Tell them the Ring software you use communicates outbound and inbound via udp on port 80 (and it's fixed, the ports cannot be changed). They should be able to let you know from that information whether you do or not.

- Tim

[nortoneye]

Tim,

the ISP support folks indicated the fiber optic network they have connects differently than a cable based network-we did try to open port 80 and connect with a dynamic IP, but it would not connect without assigning a static IP...don't know if this will be a problem with fiber optic based networks or not..I'll mention it to Tim Ring as well--thanks for your suggestions!

Jim

[G8B4Life]

Jim, I'd definitely pass on what you had to do to Tim Ring.

Who is your ISP if you don't mind me asking (you can PM me the answer if you don't want to make it public).  Their description of "connects differently" does sound like they use some type of Carrier Grade NAT and I'd like to see if I can find out anything about the technology they use.

Expanding on this a bit, even with a static IP address you could technically (but unlikely) still be behind Carrier Grade NAT but the static address means your ISP can open a port up just for you and no one else as I mentioned earlier. If your interested in finding out whether you have a public routable IP address or a private IP address (CGN) you can try a couple of things.

The best way: you can check whether your IP address reported by websites like www.whatismyip.com and the WAN interface IP address (you'll need to log into your router to check this IP address) match, or, the second best way, you can run the Traceroute test in the UDP test tool and check if any of the IP addresses after the first Hop (especially the second Hop) are in the private address range thus:

10.0.0.0 -- 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 -- 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255
100.64.0.0–100.127.255.255

The first three are common to the LAN side of your router and you'd see an address in one of those ranges as the first Hop if you do the traceroute test. The fouth range is a dead giveaway of GCN.

- Tim

[nortoneye]

Tim,

my ISP is Paul Bunyan Communications in Bemidji, Mn, a local cooperative that has invested heavily in fiber optics which they promote as "the Giga Zone" as they have speeds of up to a gigabite/sec.   Great for streaming and downloading versus the 100MB speed of my prior cable based provider.

I did send an email to Tim Ring regarding this issue.

Jim

[G8B4Life]

Ding ding ding we have a winner! Directly from the horses mouth, or more correctly from the Paul Bunyan Net Neutrality page at https://paulbunyan.net/residential/internet/net-neutrality-disclosure/ Paul Bunyan uses Carrier Grade NAT:

Our GigaZone service requires the purchase of a globally routable IP address ($10/month) to remove the basic firewall.

While they are talking about their firewall service in the webpage what it means in this instance is that they can't configure their CGN equipment to work with RPA, and it's almost certainly due to the fixed inbound port number.

- Tim

[nortoneye]

Tim,

Thanks for figuring this out-at least now I know what the issue is/was.   The extra charge is kinda a pain, but the connection speed is nice to have.  On the flip side as members of the cooperative, we receive a dividend check that should cover the added expense.

Now I'm waiting for more steam sounds......


jim

[nortoneye]

Hello all.

I did send the info to Tim Ring
Info
9:58 AM (5 hours ago)
to me

Hi Jim,

Thanks very much for the feedback!  We do appreciate it! 

I see a couple tings that do not make any sense unless GigaZone's goal is just to up-charge their customers for services that basically all other Internet Providers offer included in their price. 

The statement "Our GigaZone service requires the purchase of a globally routable IP address ($10/month) to remove the basic firewall." is an absurd statement.  All Internet providers must offer IPV4 networking (Huge vast majority of the internet ) and ALL IPV4 is by definition globally routable! IPV4 is globally routable by design.  This statement has the appearance of trying to get people to pay for a manufactured technical problem.  It has nothing to do with the internet begin globally routable, or our server, or your equipment.  What I hear them saying is we put in place a firewall to stop traffic and if you pay $10 we will take it out! 

You said they gave you a static IP to fix the problem.  The above information has nothing to do with a static IP. It talks about a "firewall" that the ISP is providing that is causing the problem. 

This has nothing to do with fiber connection or static vs dynamic addressing.  In our area ATT offers fiber and the default settings work just fine with our server.  The huge vast majority of home internet suppliers use dynamic IPs.  If our server was not compatible with dynamic IPs than most of our customers would not be able to use our server.

Even though it is working, you may want to consider getting a different ISP because the statement " requires the purchase of a globally routable IP address ($10/month) " is not normal form typical ISPs. 

Tim

I also sent a redacted version of his reply to my ISP for comment-nothing so far.