Can't open Ports, How to access beyond LAN?

TheroRando@lemmy.one to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 23 points –

My ISP doesn't give a Public IP and let me open ports without paying a extra fee, which I cannot afford rn. I host all my services on a old PC, Anyways that i can access my services beyond my LAN?

22

You have a few options. Depending on what your trying to do you could look into Tailscale or ZeroTeir. Basically they create a small VPN that you can join multiple devices to. This won't open the services to the public internet but it will open the services to whatever devices join your private Tailscale/ZeroTeir network running over the public internet.

Someone already mentioned but CloudFlare Tunnels would be a really good fit as well.

Another option but more expensive and most complex is rent a VPS in the cloud somewhere setup a VPN link between the box and your PC and then route the traffic thought that VPS. All public access will hit your VPS public IP and port numbers and get relayed though that back to your PC.

Never Knew but This is what i am looking for, Thus on. Just Keeping the services and to myself sounds like a bliss for me. Thanks man really appreciate it 🫂

One thing I'm wondering about tailscale or zerotier or setting up a VPN on a VPS - how would that affect me using a 3rd party VPN client (e.g. Proton, Mullvad etc) on my PC and/or phone?

To connect to a locally hosted service using one of those options, would I have to first disconnect from the 3rd party client?

Probably depends on how the OS handles multiple VPN connections. Technically I see no reason why you can't have multiple VPNs active at once.

Is that last one almost like a reverse proxy?

Yeah a reverse proxy would be a really easy way to do it. Assuming whatever your trying to expose will work with one.

But for traffic like a game server or something else that doesn't use the traditional http protocol you could also setup the VPS as more of a router/NAT if you wanted.

Although that said I think NGINX can do a proxy stream that will work with most TCP/UDP connections no matter the protocol, I haven't ever done it so I can't say how universal that works.

Tailscale and Zerotier might be suitable for this, and they're free for personal use. The can be used to work around NAT because they can route your traffic over their transparent relays.

That's Really Lovely to hear and I am just a tad bit curious, How can someone make sure that the relay's are transparent? You cannot really go and check it there to find out, can we?

Transparent here means the use of the relay is invisible to you. If two devices under the same tailscale/Zerotier network can access each other (e.g. in the same lan), then the relay won't be used. But if both devices are under separate networks (e.g. one in your home, and the other is your phone while outside your home, and both devices are behind NATs), the relay will be automatically used as a bridge so both devices can communicate with each others.

Connections to relays are encrypted, but Zerotier allows you to setup your own relay server if you worry about privacy. Not sure about tailscale.

ultimately, you will need some kind of access to something with at least one port open, if you intend to host services on the clearnet. you could use tor if onion services will work for you. if you have ssh access somewhere with a port open (or a friendly sysadmin), you could tunnel to there and redirect incoming connections back through the tunnel. same thing with a VPN, if the sysadmin is really friendly.

I initially wanted to open it to the clearnet but users suggested ZeroTeir and I think that works great!

Use tailscale as it is easy to setup, and just with 1 or 2 commands you can have it setup to forward subnets (which can let you use the same local IPs remotely to connect back, instead of Tailscale assigned once) and Exit Node (route all your internet traffic from your Home connection when you are on public network and enable exit note on client)