BLOCKED by ISP!

[andycrofts]

Hi.
I'm using 'Home-PNA' here. I couldn't access my server from outside, so I asked my ISP.
They tell me that
If you have Home-PNA connection, all incoming connections are blocked by our routers, so you cannot establish connections to your computer from outside.
Pity. I travel the planet a lot, and I wanted to use the home server for storage (backup) of presentations, etc of my laptop data.

OK, anyone know of any tricks???

-Andy

[TheKessel]

How do you physically connect to your provider? Just because your systems connect to each other via HomePNA, that should not stop you from getting an IP address from your ISP when you connect. From there you should be able to connect to your main system and then get into what ever system on your network and store the files.

[andycrofts]

Wish t'were that simple!
I've only one Linux box at home, but I can't make it a webserver according to what they say (see orig. post).
There must be a hack!
-Andy

[sgs521]

Andy..
Does your isp assign you an internal ip address? possibly in the 10.x.x.x range or do you have a normal class ip address e.g. 66.x.x.x or whatever your range is?


There is a dsl provider here who assigns all it's customers an internal ip address of 10.x.x.x so that you proxy through their servers for all internet traffic.. this makes it a great pain asm y friend and I play online games quite a bit and I always have to host because he does not have an ip available to the outside world..

[Aglavalin]

If they are just blocking website access, then they may be blocking only port 80. This is pretty common as of about a year ago when that damn codered virus was causing chaos. Try setting your webserver to port 8080, or some other high port number no one uses on a regular basis to be more secure, to get around this type of ISP blocking.

[furrycat]

If they really are blocking ALL incoming connections then cancel your account and go to a proper ISP. That is an unreasonable restriction of service.

Ways to get round the problem? Very few, and far from "easy" to implement.

Your best bet is probably to get your home machine to initiate a secure shell connection to where you are and have it use port forwarding to forward connections back from the remote host.

The way this works is ssh makes a connection to You [=the machine from whcih you want to phone home] and listens on Your port 22 (say). Any traffic to that port is forwarded through the secure channel back Home.

You can try this out at home on the local network so you are happy with it.

Of course the other thing you have to do is make your Home machine aware of where You are. One way - by no means the only one - would be to write a script which parses an email with a particular message. Then you can mail yourself from the machine You are on and wait for the Home machine to respond an initiate the connection. Needless to say this will only work if You can accept ssh connections, which is unlikely in any location you're likely to want to do this.

[andycrofts]

Thanks, "Furry Cat".
I'll give that a try.
Unfortunately, with the Finnish population at the 5 million mark, ISp's are a bit thin on the ground...
But I'll work on your idea and give it a shot.

I've tried all the 'usual' ports, probed by www.myserver.org, and even stuck a few imaginary ones in (I use webmin at work on a work server, using default port 10,000 - even that's blocked here)

-Cheers
-Andy

[furrycat]

If you can find a friend with a server outside your network you might be able to set up a VPN, which would probably be easier.