Comment by shoeffner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shoeffner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I also remember having IPv6 in Germany for years now, but it came with lots of problems: routers cannot forward things properly, thus self-hosting at home becomes tricky, or playing games with friends without dedicated servers (yes, they still exist, no, not all support IPv6). It gets even worse with "DS-Lite", where multiple customers share the same external IPv4 address, to enable support for all the webservices not supporting IPv6 yet.

All in all, I had so many troubles with setting up anything behind IPv6 or DS-lite, that I asked my ISP to give me an additional IPv4 address, so that I don't have troubles. While they usually provide bad service, this came for free -- but other ISPs, for example my parents' ISP, want you to pay 50 or more euros per month for an "enterprise contract" to get a dedicated IPv4. I still haven't found a way for my dad to setup his old webcam server at home such that others can reach it from the outside world, and I tried every couple months over the last 6 years or so.

How about keeping connection open from the webcam server or any host on the same LAN with a ssh reverse tunnel to a cheap cloud server?

For example when the webcam server is reachable on LAN at 192.168.1.2:1337 you can do

$ ssh -N -T -R 1338:192.168.1.2:1337 user@cloudserver.com

on a raspberry pi on the same LAN or locally in the webcam server and then you can access the webcam server from anywhere using cloudserver.com:1338

I considered such options before but if I remember correctly, the webhost does not allow SSH. However, I haven't checked for some time and I will definitely look into this, thank you!

Besides provider sometimes have strange port rules it's not uncommon for them to forcefully change your IP from time to time, even if there is an open connection. It tends to happen at night and it tends to be a forceful disconnect from your router to the outside world for <5min.

At least I ran into this frequently (multiple times a week, I really need to fix my sleep cycle).

Have you tried Tailscale? It is a quite simple way to create a private subnet to easily access servers behind a nat. Install a raspberry somewhere in your parents house and you can share the whole subnet with all the devices connected to the same account.

Not affiliated, just a happy user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com