Cannot Connect to RailPro Server

[nortoneye]

Sounds familiar to me.....I am still paying 10 bucks a month to my ISP to circumvent the CGNAT issue with a public IP address.  The last time I spoke to TR, he reported the new server got him "closer to solving this issue"  Hopefully soon, would be nice to save the 10 bucks!

Merry Christmas to all

[G8B4Life]

What's to solve? It's only network programming, not rocket science. The cause and the solution are both known.

- Tim

[faithie999]

I just discovered today that I am among the lucky folks with an ISP who uses CGNAT.  a few months ago I switched from Uverse to Metronet (in Indianapolis) because MN is fiber to my utility room, 200mb up and down, and about $10 less than uverse.

today I tried to set up remote access for my Plex server and discovered that metronet uses CGNAT.  on the Plex forum I read about a little program called "ngrok" which supposedly (I'm still testing) will get around the cgnat issue for remote access to my Plex server.

might be worth trying for accessing the ring server, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that.

here's a link to the ngrok site.   https://ngrok.com

It may have no relevance to the Ring server access issue.

ken

[G8B4Life]

Welcome to the world of ISP's taking the easy way out without thought of ramifications to it's users!

Unfortunately it is very unlikely ngrok will work for RailPro. ngrok is designed to allow outside connections (from the greater internet) to a server you run at home (of which RPA is not a server, but Plex is) by providing a piece of tunneling software you install at home and their server which maps an external (public) address to the local (private) address of your server stuck behind CGNAT.

The key piece in making ngrok work, apart from any code changes to the tunneling software (which would probably be a lot) is that you'd need to control their server so you could correct the mapping to suit Rings Server. This is almost certainly an impossibility. ngrok doesn't change what port mapping your ISP does as part of it's CGNAT implementation so making an educated guess it's probable that any RPA communication to Rings server would leave the ngrok server with a source port that is different to the one that Rings server will send back to, and then we're back to square one; Rings reply has no way of being mapped back to you without the port mapping on the ngrok server being corrected.

All that being said, ngrok is a similar approach to what I've been taking on the CGNAT work around I've been working on. Who knows, I might even have a beta available for testing soon; unfortunately I have a lot of free time on my hands for a while 

- Tim

[faithie999]

thanks for the quick reply and the explanation.  I more or less figured out later last evening and this morning that I was using ngrok's server to connect to my Plex server.

I will experiment later today to see if I can connect to ring's server using my laptop connected to my iPhone hotspot (spectrum which uses Verizon's network) or my iPad hotspot (t-mobile).

ken

[William Brillinger]

Ken, do please also make sure Ring knows that you are having the CGNAT issue.

[faithie999]

I will let Ring know there is another user behind CGNAT!

as expected, I can't reach the server from Rail Pro Assistant.

I also cannot connect to the server when I use my iPhone's hotspot (Verizon) connected to my PC.   is that user error or is that not expected to work, either?

how do I test for CGNAT when connected:   PC-->hotspot-->internet?

thanks!

update:  I stopped at Starbucks and verified that I can connect to the Ring server using their wifi, so that (or doing from my church's wifi) will be the work-around.

[G8B4Life]

... or is that not expected to work, either?

This. Telco's use CGNAT virtually exclusively. If you imagine Verzion had 1 million mobile data customers and each of those customers had at least 2 devices (say phone + iPad) that'd be 2 million public IP address they have to have on hand (at about USD$20.00 a pop these days). That's not going to happen so they use CGNAT for mobile data connections.

how do I test for CGNAT when connected:   PC-->hotspot-->internet?

You can use the UDP test tool found here in the files section to do a PAT test. That's probably the easiest way.

- Tim

[faithie999]

Tim--at the risk of causing thread drift, in a nutshell why don't isp's want to convert to ipv6?  I assume there must be costs involved?

[G8B4Life]

Simple. It costs money to deploy and test it. CGNAT is much easier to implement and costs less (short term thinking). CGNAT was really only supposed to be an interim for ISP's, backbone providers etc while they deployed IPv6 but generally speaking many are taking "interim" to the extreme. The number of ISP's here using can be counted on one hand, with missing fingers!

- Tim