Just set up my NAS, and it is a pointless box

Posted 19th Jul 2023

So I decided to splash out a bit, and bought myself a DS220+ with plenty of storage, with the intention of running a service for my father whose lifestyle is erratic due to age related issues, and has trouble catching his programs. Rather than having him stay glued to the box at all hours for his shows, having to subscribe to various networks, and equally important, reducing the variety of remotes to choose from, I wanted to get all his shows, lock the TV to Plex, and all would be good.
Well no good deed goes unpunished. I now find out that my ISP runs CGNAT, and I am having issues trying to find a way around paying an extortionate amount of money just to have a fixed ip address.
I understand it can cause issues for gamers as well with lag. Mine is not the only supplier to dump on their clients like this, and of course ipv6 is not available yet
How have people got around this?

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20th Jul
You could get a dedicated IP which runs directly from your NAS on a virtual router. Not that expensive but not a pretty solution, I think nord vpn offer for like £3/m. But at that point you may have been better off running it from a paid VPS etc.
20th Jul
Are you sure you IP address changes, most ISPs provide you with a pseudo-static IP address, whilst it can and does change it's not that frequent. I used free software to send me an email when the IP address changed and I could then manually update whatever services I needed to.
Of course I can't recall the name of that package, but there are many tools available (you can even use a PowerShell script).
gearboxcomputers.com/pro…er/

You may also have better success using a free Dynamic DNS entry, here's free tool: dynu.com/en-US
20th Jul
They are behind CGNAT.
20th Jul
After having this problem with YouFibre and trying various options including IPv6 when they rolled it out, I settled on just paying the £5 a month for a static IPv4. Much less hassle.
Author
20th Jul
What hassle did you try to implement? I have the time to sit and bodge, as long as it works.
I appreciate I should have researched it before buying shiny, and expensive, toys, but as the service is sold as being ideal for "serious gamers" etc, it was not something I even considered, or had the knowledge to investigate.
20th Jul
If your father has a proper (non cgnated) IP address, perhaps you could connect yours and his network with a VPN tunnel, with the VPN server such as wireguard running on something like a Raspberry PI on his network and have the client on yours. I think you'd want to have your LANs set up on different subnets. (edited)
Author
20th Jul
I want to reduce the tech in his home. At the moment, 2 remotes is bad enough. I have rung before now to find he has no TV for several days because he changed the hdmi input having used the wrong remote, and saw no reason to ring me.
He could use the BT TV record service, but can be hit or miss with that. It would also mean he has to check, and program up to a week in advance for the shows that appear in the early hours, or for when he should be in the garden etc.
My intention is to load up every series of his choice, ditch the BT, add the Plex app, and glue several buttons to make them inoperative. High resolution is not an issue. The TV won't support higher than HD, and his eyes probably couldn't tell the difference from 720. So no transcoding or similar required.
20th Jul
Not sure what quality/bandwidth the content you have is, but could you use a relay?

support.plex.tv/art…ay/
Author
20th Jul
720 would be sufficient for him. That page did not come up for me.
Thanks
20th Jul
Depending on the router, maybe you could leverage Tailscale - haven;t used it but...

tailscale.com/kb/…gy/
Author
22nd Jul
Unfortunately you need to also install on the accessing device, which would be a low level Smart TV..
I like the idea of the relay for its simplicity to the operator, for whom even sending a text is a journey to a troubled land, but thanks for the suggestion
21st Jul
I was in your exact situation, got 5g broadband with 3 and then realised I can't access anything from outside home (CGNAT issue)!

I looked at a few options and the one that I went for was zerotier, it runs on my open-wrt router then I add devices to it via my zerotier account. It'll make sense when you actually create an account and a network. And it's all free. (edited)
Author
21st Jul
I've just had a quick look at ZT and might be the solution. I note that on the ZT page they tell you to run in another program called Docker. I am assuming that is a virtual program. You made no mention, so is that something you were able to avoid? I have a DS220+ with DSM7
21st Jul
you could look into this

Cloudflare Tunnel
25th Jul
When you are behind a CGNAT, the best option is to set up a tunnel to another server (that does not use a shared external IP address). At the server side, set up a reverse proxy (such as via use of nginx). It is also possible to enable HTTPS access within nginx by using free LetsEncrypt certificates, which you can auto-renew via scripts.

If you do not have access to such a server or prefer not to rent a VPS, you can use something called PageKite pagekite.net/ and this performs the above functionality using pagekite's pre-configured servers. The costs are incredibly cheap. It's highly recommended that you still protect your content with HTPPS, hence you may need to use nginx as a reverse proxy and install LetsEncrypt certificates at your end.

I have used all of the above with 100% success. If you want a completely free solution, you can sign up for free tier cloud platforms (Oracle springs to mind).

I am not sure what the person above is talking about, regarding dynamic DNS - that did make me laugh!
16th Aug
Sorry to add a late reply but I recently moved ISPs and had the same issue with CGNAT, however as I already had a Cloudflare tunnel up and running I didn't experience any down time so I would definitely recommend. If you don't use a reverse proxy you'll have to configure the tunnel to expose your applications/needed ports.

I did also host my own Wireguard VPN, but had to change to using Tailscale (exit node and subnet routing setup). Elliott's suggestion is great also, and its the usual approach for this situation. I have some Oracle free instances to potentially use for this but honestly the Cloudflare tunnel suits my needs perfectly.