mobile 'server at home' setup questions please

[terrygogo]

Hello,
I am loving the idea of running Cloudron. Thanks to the makers and the support from the community.

I want to setup a 'server at home' (old laptop) to make a hub for my family and friends. I have no internet connection at home. Plan to use old mobile phone 4G and tether, left on 24/7.

After reading this post,https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-04-13-home-server.html
Some questions please.

If I have my domain registered at one from the list, like Gandi. Do I still need to use a DDNS service?

How do I port forward on a mobile phone? connect a modem / router in the middle and bridge mode?
For ports 80 and 443

Thank you very much.

[girish]

Hi @terrygogo, thanks for trying us out! That's quite an interesting setup that you have in mind

The Dynamic DNS comes in to effect when your 4G connection has an IP address that keeps changing. AFAIK, all residential land line connections and mobile 4G networks have dynamic IPs. This then means that even if you use Gandi, you have to enable the Dynamic DNS option on Cloudron. (On a side note, I have often wondered why we get dynamic IPs given that most of our homes are always connected to internet... My understanding is that this whole concept of dynamic IP is a carry over from the dial up modem days where the ISP will cycle through a bunch of IPs. And then these days they just see an opportunity to charge more fixed IPs for business use. Can't see any other reason).

For the port forwarding, I have no clue how 4G networks work. I guess it depends a lot on your telecom provider as well. As a simple test, you can connect your laptop to the internet and run sudo nc -l 0.0.0.0 80. That will basically create a simple server that listens on port 80. You can then try to connect from outside using telnet <ip> 80 and see if it works. Repeat for port 443.

[plusone-nick]

4G devices (even hotspots) were not really designed for this type of deployment but there are the fringe "solutions" that could technically make this happen, its not common.. I've seen recent 5G hardware/features that would apply here but that would require an upgrade: https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-225021/

Hope this helps, +1

EDIT: also, I love what you're going for here and think its not far off from being a level of norm - please keep us posted if you end up deploying =]

[terrygogo]

I did more reading and found out the consumer 4G here in AU will not work, no public IP, no port forward

[plusone-nick]

@terrygogo Sorry to hear that, hopefully you find a better solution

[A Former User]

@terrygogo try static ip from your provider.