CGNAT blocking external access to NAS. Looking to address this plus more.
CGNAT blocking external access to NAS. Looking to address this plus more.
- For my first goal, I want to get around my ISP's CGNAT so I can access my NAS outside my network. Tailscale doesn't work. Attempting to access my NAS always goes through their relays. From what I've gathered, a VPS is a good way to get around this so I got the basic $1/mo Racknerd KVM VPS. I'd like a performant way to manage this with low latency being ideal. That is my primary goal. From what I've researched, wireguard would be the most performant way to make that connection. I'd like to be able to access my NAS's primary IP or even set up reverse proxies so I can access it from outside the network, without sending all my network traffic through the NAS. I was under the impression tailscale did this but for some reason when I have tailscale active on my macbook, speedtests show major lag over 100ms.
- I've heard wireguard was the most performant but anything will do with the goal of accessing my NAS. The maximum I need is to be able to stream 4k hdr/dolby atmos content from my NAS.
- My second goal is to set up Unbound, Blocky and maybe have a fallback to quad9. I'd also like my devices to be able to use this externally. I set up a basic version of this today using this guide. However upon more investigation, I've learned Blocky causes much less latency than pihole. I went down a rabbit hole, researching nextdns, dnsfilter, etc. I think Blocky and Unbound will be great, but I'm more interested in the goal than the technology used to get there. I'm primarily interested in a low latency content/ad/tracker/malicious blocker that's available on and off my network.
- Would it introduce less latency to run this locally off my NAS, and have a separate version set up in the cloud for when I'm away from home? I'll happily do this if there's any tangible benefit. My routing setup is ISP modem/router -> asus zenwifi router-> 10g switch, then my PC and NAS. All connected by cable.
- Is there a way to set this up with the primary goal of having external access to my NAS? I feel like there's a way to kill two birds with one stone with this. Like maybe having the DNS resolve my NAS's internal IP to the VPS external IP which will then forward traffic requesting that IP address to the NAS somehow (not sure how exactly to accomplish this, or if it's possible).
- I set this up originally on GCP due the guide I followed mentioning performance benefits. I'd be willing to host all this on the VPS if that's possible, but would prioritize high availability, reliability and low latency, which I believe GCP would give me better than my budget VPS. Strangely, the latency when connected to the current setup, GRC DNS benchmark is showing 100+ ms latency, while with it deactivated I get about 50ms average.
- My third and kinda stretch goal is to host my website and side projects with the help of the VPS since I'll most likely not be using all the storage, bandwidth or computing power from just my primary and secondary goals. I currently host using github pages and redirect to my domain using cloudflare. I had my projects hosted on heroku. It seems like there's a heroku free tier popping up and then quickly enshittifying every other week so it just seems more reliable to host it myself.
- It goes without saying that I'd like to have this be as secure as possible as I've read lots of self hosting horror stories. My priorities are security, cost, reliability, performance in that order. I think hosting unbound/blocky on the VPS would make for a more elegant and easy to maintain solution, but I'm not 100% sure of the reliability and performance of Racknerd's budget level VPS offerings.
- So to retierate, I'd like to access my NAS which is behind a CGNAT externally, set up ad/tracker/malicious content blocking, and host my website/projects, with security, cost,reliability and performance in mind.
I think I want to use something like NPM, pfsense, blocky, unbound, authentik, fail2ban, and wireguard. either divided between free tier cloud hosts like GCP and oracle, and my VPS for less critical stuff like NAS access, or just put it all on the VPS if that's easier. I've done an absolute boatload of research to try and educate myself, which I've not included here because this would make this already lengthy post even longer. That said I'm still very noobish with all of this and appreciate any advice!
Ipv6
Cgnats don't exist in ipv6. Nat doesn't exist in ipv6
What also could happen is your isp blocking some ports from outside its network as a security approach, but normally you can ask to free a range of port from the firewall.
My ISP doesn't support IPv6.
NAT certainly exists in IPV6, I use it on my home network for my nginx proxy VM. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to change the IP on the host so I do NAT on my router. 🤷♂️
This is not the Nat functionality as people associated with ipv4, and certainly it is not showing the drawback of allowing the communication only when the NATed client started the communication.
Even if they are alike they are not the same.
I reaffirm myself here. It is possible to have full ipv6 communication and providers do not have cgnats. It is your easiest and most uncomplicated solution with almost nothing to install to make it work.
And in addition, I have to say that I don't see any benefit in using such functionality at home. If someone can illustrate me a use case I would be thankful
Tailscale doesn’t work? Because that’s what I use to get around my isp cgnat
Nope, tailscale ping can't establish a direct connection and trying to access the NAS is pretty much impossible.
Just a few thoughts:
- don't cheap out. Building your whole stack on top of free or ultra budget providers is going to backfire eventually
- check the traffic limits if you want to stream 4k content from your NAS
- if latency and bandwidth is a concern, you need to select a VPS provider with good peering. This fully depends on your ISP.
- i'd recommend setting things up with split DNS. Your DNS server would answer with local IPs for queries from within your LAN and with the IP of the VPS for external queries.
- take a look at AdGuard Home
- you can skip fail2ban if you go straight for ssh keys
- 100% wireguard
check the traffic limits if you want to stream 4k content from your NAS
For the VPS I chose, the bandwidth limit is 2tb. That's definitely more than enough! Unless there's another way they can limit traffic aside from that.
you can skip fail2ban if you go straight for ssh keys
Can you explain that further? Where in the chain would I put this? I'm guessing basically every device I'd want to communicate with the VPS would need an ssh key right? And I could set it up so only particular requests require ssh keys, in case I wanted my homepage to be accessible by anyone?
Thanks for the advice btw!
don’t cheap out. Building your whole stack on top of free or ultra budget providers is going to backfire eventually
I think ideally this would all run on a cloud host. But would it be possible to stream plex without incurring massive charges?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation Plex Brand of media server package SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
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I'm pretty sure I used this setup: https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-vpn.html
VPS running wireguard server, proxies all traffic to/from my home server. Home server URL DNS records point to VPS static IP. Certbot runs with --no-checks flag to obtain letsencrypt cert.
Right on, thanks, I’m gonna give this a shot!
Did you ask your ISP to remove CGNAT? It worked for me
Same here, for my ISP it's no extra charge, they just ask you why you're opting out
No, they're extremely closed up. You have to buy an enterprise package for that
I had a similar problem with my ISP's CGNAT, and Zero-Tier One is what got around it for me.
is that just the free tier? I'll have to test this out!
edit: no luck with zero tier. Has the same issue as tailscale but i don't think they have relays in case it can't make a connection. It's just timing out.
I setup a VPN on Oracle free tier that I use to access my server. It can be difficult to sign up and the ARM instances are hard to get though.
My concern with using any cloud host would be streaming 4k plex videos over it. I have a feeling that would end up being pretty costly. I'd prefer this whole set up over the cloud but I chose VPS because it allows TBs of bandwidth included in the price which should be more than sufficient.