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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Port Forwarding Alternative? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Edit: Big thanks to everybody who shared their advice! :) I'm very pleasantly surprised and will definitely explore all the options you guys provided, such as getting an additional router or configuring Tailscale. Again, big thanks to everyone!

Hi all, I've recently moved and now my ISP doesn't allow port forwarding for wired connections (wifi only), and my landlord does not allow changing ISPs. Now my home server is practically useless which makes me very sad.

Is there any easy way to still access device ports without port forwarding or buying a wifi card/dongle is my safest bet?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm in US. My ISP Xfinity decided their users are too stupid to use router settings so they purged port forwarding settings from the router panel altogether. Now you have to use their mobile application which doesn't allow you to make port forwarding rules for a specific IP (because again, they think their user is an idiot that can't figure out IP numbers), instead it just gives you a list of devices and you have to select one to create a port forwarding rule. Wired devices are not on that list.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

What you could do, is set your phone with a temporary static IP (like, manually set on the device if the router doesn't have static leases). Then port forward to your phone as you would for the server. Then, set the phone back to DHCP, and set the server as the same static IP you used.

Assuming the router isn't smart enough to try to follow your phone's IP, you'll effectively have forwarded for the server.

It may also do it based on DHCP provided names, rather than WiFi names. In that case, you should make sure the server uses DHCP and advertises a valid name. If it's already got a static IP, that would explain why it doesn't show up on the UI.