One of the great features of using a Fusionhub and PepVPN is the ability to bond two or more cheap, consumer cellular connections to achieve benefits such as bonding and failover. However, sometimes a device, for example an IP camera on your local area network (LAN), may need to be reached from the internet through a cloud hosted Fusionhub.
By default, this access may be blocked by a firewall and/or by NAT as it is seen as an unsolicited connection.
Typically, we’d use port forwarding to allow such unsolicited connections through the NAT firewall on specific ports, making it possible for devices on the internet to initiate connections and access services on a local device – but what if we don’t have access to the firewalls or routers that might be blocking inbound traffic?
The problem with these private, carrier grade IP’s is that port forwarding just isn’t possible :
In the above case, inbound requests cannot be made to clients within the LAN, as the remote host has no way to know the WAN port of the peplink device.
A Solution to the problem.
Where remote access is required to any device that may be behind the carrier-grade NAT of one or multiple bonded cellular connections, we can create a PepVPN tunnel to a cloud hosted Fusionhub that has its own public IP and then port forward from The Fusionhub to the LAN device we want to access over the tunnel:
Forwarding Ports on the Fusionhub
The first step should be to reserve the IP address of the LAN device that we want to reach from the outside by adding a DHCP reservation for it’s IP address, please see the separate article “DHCP Reservation” to see the steps taken to achieve this.
Next, from InControl, use Remote Web Admin to open the Fusionhub’s webgui.
Network>Inbound Access>Port Forwarding>Add Service
Name the service, select the correct protocol and port required.
Click ‘all’ connection/IP addresses and select WAN and PepVPN NAT mode and the public IP.
Enter the server IP address to forward the ports to and save the configuration.
Lastly, save the configuration to the Fusionhub.