Port forward on strict ISP?
reddit / selfhosted

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the-absolute-chad · 2023-11-16 14:23

I have a home storage, i want it to be accessible through my IP, but
the ISP has disabled port forward so that's not an option. I tried
ngrok and it's not reliable for large transfers. Is there any other
method i could possibly make my home server accessible without relying
on third party services that will bottleneck me?

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Malossi167 · 2023-11-16 14:55

Rent a VPS and run a VPN server there or use something like Tailscale

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PhilipLGriffiths88 · 2023-11-16 15:03

Host [zrok.io](https://zrok.io) yourself and you have no bottleneck.
Our bandwidth limits for the free SaaS are pretty generous though...
how much data are we talking?

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Haliphone · 2023-11-16 20:01

I'm an idiot. Can you explain zrok to me in a way I'd mostly
understand?

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dovholuknf · 2023-11-16 20:10

zrok.io is basically the same exact thing as ngrok. It's from the
openziti project (i'm a dev/maintainer on openziti). It's got some
features that ngrok doesn't provide yet (private sharing being a key
one for us) and it's got some _generous_ limits on the service since
it's free. Hence why Philip is asking about 'how much data'

> I tried ngrok and it's not reliable for large transfers.

Any network transfer can suffer from this. The key is what the tool is
doing the transfer. It needs to be 'restartable'. Maybe that was the
problem you had?

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Haliphone · 2023-11-16 20:57

Cheers, I googled ngrok. And I'm falling down a rabbit hole of
learning!

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dovholuknf · 2023-11-16 21:01

I'm sorry. I didn't realize you meant literally! lol

zrok and ngrok are two excellent tools that allow you to share
services from "somewhere" very quickly and very easily with low
friction. They are both services available for free on the internet.

So for example, if you have a server locally you want to access it
from anywhere (or give me access etc) you 'share' it and then someone
from anywhere can get to it quickly / easily.

The services are incredibly handy to have available to share private
files, share websites,  etc (and a bunch of other stuff).

happy learning

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tech2but1 · 2023-11-16 22:22

What bottlenecks are you experiencing on which services exactly?

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xkcd__386 · 2023-11-17 12:07

oh TIL!  Never heard of zrok till now; thank you!

Last time I checked, ngrok's license/TOS said something like "ngrok
captures all traffic for inspection and replay" (or words to that
effect).  I never understood if that was happening on the client side,
or on the ngrok _server_ side so I stayed away even when I needed
something like it, preferring to use my VPS.

I will try this out; thanks again

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dovholuknf · 2023-11-17 12:30

You're welcome. The public zrok endpoint doesn't do that fwiw (the one
that's similar/the same as ngrok). With private sharing though, that's
entirely impossible due to the OpenZiti zero trust network zrok uses.
You'll have full end to end encryption with private sharing, so even
if zrok.io wanted to try to inspect traffic, it can't. The public
sharing stuff is "you'll have to trust us" because, well, that's just
how TLS works. :)

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xkcd__386 · 2023-11-17 14:17

good enough for me :)

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Haliphone · 2023-11-22 14:32

No worries and thank you