VPS to bypass CGNAT

SpezCanLigmaBalls@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 12 points –

I have T-Mobile wifi (Really great btw for $30 with my plan) but it has the big dumb cgnat. I have a plex server and you can't stream remotely with it. I had an Oracle VPS but after my trial ran out they decided they wanted to delete it with no warning.

I was using a wireguard vpn connected to my vps with Plex ports to bypass it. Right now oracle is out of instances for me to use so I thought I could see if there are any better alternatives.

I am using this GitHub script to do it

https://github.com/mochman/Bypass_CGNAT/wiki

I am wondering if anybody knows of a good VPS that I could use. I don't necessarily mind paying for it but I would like it to be relatively cheap if not free.

If it matters at all I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with DietPi running my plex server.

I haven't tried this but would it be possible to set up my VPN using wireguard on my pi and have plex point towards that?

I had Mullvad but since they are getting rid of port forwarding I got TorGuard (blah blah USA company, I know). Also wondering if there are better VPNs that I could use for... Downloading... Stuff

The guide has digital ocean and AWS Lightrail also but im not sure which one would be best and less likely to delete my account. I would prefer to use a VPN that I already pay for but im just not all too sure on how to go about that

Edit: Ended up using rack nerd. Got their 4tb monthly vps for $14 a year. Perfect for me

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I use RackNerd for public reverse proxies on my lab. Their New Years sales is still active, and is very affordable. Only $13/yr for 1GB RAM KVM VPS, plenty for a personal reverse proxy or VPN.

No issues with service, their support is great and responds promptly.

Didn't expect to see a shout out for racknerd. I been using them for quite a few years. Got a 3.5 GB KVM for $28.99/year deal. They even upgraded their infrastructure since and moved my server over to a full SSD node.

I believe some use tailscale for this, although I don't entirely like having a third party store wireguard keys if I'm understanding it correctly.

Not quite what you're asking, but I use localtonet to get around T-mo's CGNAT. Similar to Ngrok and other solutions, but the price was lower.

Ramnode is a good smaller US provider, they don't oversell as much as many providers do, and their shit is fast.

I know that this is not what you're looking for, but, have you tried directly talking with your telco? Most companies will get you out of the CGNAT if you say that you have IP cameras for security purposes.

I never used it, but I bumped into ngrok when I was researching remote accessing services hosted behind CGNAT, and it turned out to be not needed in my case, but maybe it's worth for you to check it out: https://ngrok.com/docs/using-ngrok-with/cgnat/

I’m not all too knowledgeable with this stuff but it has the command http 80. Does that mean it is opening port 80 using ngrok? The plex port I need is 32400 tcp. Would it just be as simple as doing http 32400?

Here's a howto for your case. In the end it should be like 'ngrok tcp 32400'. You can try it out, while you're searching for a VPS 🙂

It's not the cheapest but I use a DigitalOcean instance to do what you are describing. I've been burned by VPS hosts and I've enjoyed the complete lack of drama or downtime with DigitalOcean.

For port forwarding I'm using Private Internet Access and gluetun. I don't really recommend Private Internet Access and, like you, I'm interested in a better solution. It'd be nice if I could use ProtonVPN's port forwarding but it looks like that only works if you use their app.

Yeah I think I'll just use digital ocean. It has 1tb per month and I think that will get me by with no problem. Only $4 a month also which is cheap enough for me

I chose Vultr because a friend recommended it, and the generous egress bandwidth provided. With a single $5 VPS you get 2TB free egress (this is for the whole account) + 1TB earned over the month (it gives the 1TB evenly out as the month progresses). This is more bandwidth than I'll probably ever use for my services so I don't have to be too concerned about bandwidth usage. So far I've hosted a few game servers and some HTTP web services (including my lemmy instance) with no issue.

If you are connecting to your plex server from a device that supports it , tailscale is very handy and free.

I personally forward all my stuff via a wireguard tunnel setup in linode. However, I would strongly advise against exposing services to the internet.

I do this, too. I haven’t tried Tailscale, but Netmaker wasn’t able to deal with my CGNAT without a relay node, and I found that to be hit-and-miss.

I like wireguard because it doesn't have a lot of overhead

Tailscale and Netmaker use wireguard under the hood, so as long as you manage to establish the connections, they should be just as fast! If you need to use relaying, however, that will introduce additional overhead.

Sorry to steal your post but I am looking to set up the same thing and I am wondering if Hetzner is good for this? They have a VERY attractive 20tb network traffic allowance for only ~£4/month

I ended up using racknerd. Used the same script and it worked perfect. It was $14 total for a year and 4tb a month which is all I need. There was a few dollar extra options for my network space. Once I bought it I got it all setup in like 20 mins and that includes activation for the vps