I recently moved into a rural area and my only source of internet is 4G LTE from AT&T. I have a hotspot device called ATT Velocity model (ZTE MF923). It has uPnP enabled, and seems to work as a router for my home network pretty well.
When I try to enable remote access, Plex flags me that I may be in a double NAT senario. The Velocity Router is the only router/modem I have here, however, when I check my public IP online it shows different than what Plex says my public IP address is (as listed on the remote access tab). I tried port forwarding on the router and have enabled DMZ settings for the internal IP that the Plex computer is using.
Often, ip address from 4g hotspots/routers are private address and so your router( at home, from at&t) and at&t (at the edge of the cellular network) are probably both natting thus your double nat. (by the way many cellular companies do this to save ip addresses)
first to double check this you need to find the wan ip address in your Velocity model ZTE MF923 (usually labeled something like Wan/Internet/external). Make a not of this.
My best guess from my experience with cellular is that you will find that your wan ip address in the ZTE MF923 will be a 10.x.x.x address. If that is the case you are probably going to have to contact your at&t and try to get a public (static) address or they may do some special routing to map your address to a public address.
(Just a Note: As a network engineer, in getting backup Internet to some fairly remote location i have had to work with both verizon and at&t cellular networks. The answer for me has been to request a static public address which usually cost 10 to 15 dollars more per month)
Called AT&T today and they were adamant that I needed a business line in order to get a static IP. Eventually I got handed off to a guy who pretended he couldn’t even speak English. Finally hung up. Is this correct? Static IP only way to fix the issue?
Also, someone more knowledgeable tell me… Could I get a router that accepts a sim card, put the ATT Velocity sim card in the router and then just disable NAT on that router. Since the tower is doing NAT apparently… would that work ?
we have not verified that you are in a double nat situation, (I pretty sure you are )
to verify do one of two things:
open a command prompt and do a traceroute to 8.8.8.8
for windows the command would be: tracert 8.8.8.8
post the result back
go to a website on a computer in your home network like whatismyip.com make note of that address.
then log into the ZTE MF923 and look for the wan ip address (usually labeled Wan/Internet/external)
post the results back here
Called AT&T today and they were adamant that I needed a business line in order to get a static IP. Eventually I got handed off to a guy who pretended he couldn’t even speak English. Finally hung up. Is this correct? Static IP only way to fix the issue?
My experience working with celluar internet is based on businesses so that probally why i could get a static ip address.
Also, someone more knowledgeable tell me… Could I get a router that accepts a sim card, put the ATT Velocity sim card in the router and then just disable NAT on that router. Since the tower is doing NAT apparently… would that work ?
as for disabling nat on your router that will work if you only need one device or if at&t will give you multiple addresses. The main purpose of nat is to share one address with many machines. ( the reason cell phone companies can (easily) do this is because normally you only have one device per cellar connection)
Cellular Internet especially consumer grade is not ideal for hosting server or doing any kind of port forwarding.
To get remote access to work you might be able to use a second machine at a different location and establish a vpn or ssh tunnel between them but the obviously add complexity and cost
Disabling NAT on the local IP won’t help to get Plex available remotely since there will be no port forwarding if he’s in a double NAT situation simply because the ISP hasn’t forward the port to his IP:32400.
The only way I see around this is to signup for a VPN service similar to PIA and through control panel setting assign yourself a specific server close to you and 1 port you can forward. Then you set up the server with that port.
Now this will allow you to get to your server remotely as the traffic will pass from your server through a VPN channel carried over your AT&T hotspot through AT&T’s NAT to the VPN server where it now hits the normal Internet. For me with a 350MB upload speed normally I get about 150Mb through VPN setup this way. So for me it’s half speed. What I don’t know is how this trends if you only had 50MB upload speed. I would think it gets worse the faster you push the VPN and closer to true non-VPN speeds the less your pipe size. <-- but only a guess.
That’s the only work around I really know for you. As far a the VPN circuit you could run the VPN software on your server or if you have another router it might support a VPN connection and you could put this right between your server and the hotspot.
Disabling NAT on the local IP won’t help to get Plex available remotely since there will be no port forwarding if he’s in a double NAT situation simply because the ISP hasn’t forward the port to his IP:32400.
this is not necessarily quite true, it is possible to only use a single address for his plex server this would remove one nat and then because the isp controls the other nat he would need to use UPnP to get around the other nat (if the isp supports it) However this is not very reasonable as I’m sure he would need other devices on his home network and probably does not want to use Internet sharing in windows to get other devices on the network (if windows still supports it, i use linux so i can not say if it is still even an option)
build a remote plex sever hosted else where (or use plex cloud) this is probably not feasible as all local (home use) would count against your data cap which since your using cellar is probably not to high.
personally if remote access is super important, as a network engineer my favorite is number 1
Disabling NAT on the local IP won’t help to get Plex available remotely since there will be no port forwarding if he’s in a double NAT situation simply because the ISP hasn’t forward the port to his IP:32400.
this is not necessarily quite true, it is possible to only use a single address for his plex server this would remove one nat and then because the isp controls the other nat he would need to use UPnP to get around the other nat (if the isp supports it) However this is not very reasonable as I’m sure he would need other devices on his home network and probably does not want to use Internet sharing in windows to get other devices on the network (if windows still supports it, i use linux so i can not say if it is still even an option)
Well yea if the ISP had UPnP turned on but I’d highly doubt they would do such as thing. UPnP is a “home” thing and not something you’re going to find on a business/carrier network.
build a remote plex sever hosted else where (or use plex cloud) this is probably not feasible as all local (home use) would count against your data cap which since your using cellar is probably not to high.
personally if remote access is super important, as a network engineer my favorite is number 1
Good list!
Run two servers, one is for local content and another using Plex Cloud which is included in his Plex Pass. Sure he would need to setup Google Drive (or similar) to hold the files and would need to upload each file once but after that anyone outside the house could make use of the Cloud Drive. Depending on the source of his media a cheap VPS could be used to “gather” the files and upload them to the cloud drive then each file is downloaded one time to the local network.
build a remote plex sever hosted else where (or use plex cloud) this is probably not feasible as all local (home use) would count against your data cap which since your using cellar is probably not to high.
personally if remote access is super important, as a network engineer my favorite is number 1
Good list!
Run two servers, one is for local content and another using Plex Cloud which is included in his Plex Pass. Sure he would need to setup Google Drive (or similar) to hold the files and would need to upload each file once but after that anyone outside the house could make use of the Cloud Drive. Depending on the source of his media a cheap VPS could be used to “gather” the files and upload them to the cloud drive then each file is downloaded one time to the local network.
I have a local computer with 3 4tb drives in Raid 5 and a 8tb my book that backups that. So it would take 3 failures to break.
Would a VPN or SSH Tunnel still let me access content locally on my machine?
Hmm, seems like it is magically working now through an indirect connection. Not sure what happened. Looks like im limited to a 2mbps upload, but that is fine with me. My movies are never higher than 1.8. Wonder how this was accomplished.
Nope, that isn’t working either… I’m just going to build a duplicate server and put it at my friends house and use his log in to share it back to me. None of these solutions work for me, and deep searching has revealed nothing workable. You guys have been helpful in presenting ideas for me to look into… Wish someone else in my situation had a straight forward solution.
the indirect connection should work as log as you stream under 2.0, if that is not working then it seems that maybe your isp connection is not working as well as it should. Indirect connections through plex, work similar to a ssh tunnel or vpn connection
