strange behaviour Pinging Public IP - router

I've tried this on 2 different networks:
Set router to respond to ping on internet port.
Lookup public IP on www.whatsmyip.com
Use PuTTy to ssh into another server and pinging the public IP from there.
In one network 1 this works, in network 2 it won't. So the question is. What can cause this behaviour?

The public IP address (the address that external sites see your requests coming from, i.e. what whatismyip will tell you) may not be one that the router is directly reachable on, for example if Carrier-Grade NAT is deployed.
ISPs may use CGNAT if they don't have enough IPv4 addresses, in order to share a single address between multiple clients.
One way to tell if this is happening would be to compare whatismyip.com to the address the router says it has on its WAN/internet interface. If they're different (and the router is connected straight to the ISP), it's probably CGNAT at play.

Related

How does SIP/RTP determine two endpoints are on the same LAN?

I am just experimenting with my phone system and I'm wondering how both endpoints know they are on the same LAN, I have both endpoints breaking out to the cloud phone system with two separate public IP addresses, I've segmented them off from each other with a firewall so they can't see each other however every time I attempt a call between the two end points the call is setup as a peer to peer call and attempts to traverse the local LAN via RTP through the firewall, the firewall blocks the RTP communication and the call has no audio.
I am just wondering how both endpoints are realizing they are behind the same firewall/router since they are both registering with the cloud system from different public IP addresses, I wanted the call to be bridged in the cloud and not traverse the local LAN but somehow both endpoints only attempt the call over the LAN every single time and no idea how they're realising they're on the same LAN.
Anyone else encountered this before?
SIP endpoints don't have to know they are on the same LAN. They just make best use of the IP addresses you provide.
Your INVITE request will provide more insight, but from what you write my guess is that you use public IP addresses for your contact/request URI and local IP addresses in your SDP offer. The local IP addresses are probably routable through the firewall.
With ICE and STUN endpoints may select the best IPs for media traffic - but for that to work the RTP/STUN packets should be able to traverse the firewall in your LAN.
Attempts to communicate directly may mean that LAN uses IPs from public ranges or endpoints a SIP proxy were not smart enough to detect NAT in front of your LAN.

How to access REST APIs hosted locally on Alexa

I am developing a custom Alexa Skill and have a requirement where I want Alexa to access REST APIs that are hosted locally on http://localhost:8080? Any idea how to do this?
Thanks!
If you really want to do this, and I’m assuming you are hosting the skill on AWS Lambda, it would involve quite a bit of work.
Your local endpoints need to be accessible from outside of your network, which requires port forwarding in your router to your machine where the endpoints are hosted. This needs to be configured in your router.
An easier way is to deploy your project containing the API to something like Heroku, which can be done easily. They give you a domain and make the endpoints accessible to Lambda. This should be possible within their free tier.
Here' a link to a pretty good article about how IP addresses work.
Allowing a device sitting on your local network (eg. a laptop computer or Raspberry Pi connected to your wifi) to be accessed from outside your local network (eg. from a service running on AWS) will involve mapping 2 separate IP addresses:
The IP address assigned to your router (your public IP)
The private IP addresses assigned by your router to your devices (laptop, iPhone, RPi, etc).
You have a couple options for allowing your router's IP (#1) to be accessible from outside your local network:
a. Pay your internet provider to provide you with a static IP address
b. Use a dynamic DNS service such as DuckDNS or No-IP.
Once you have a fixed public IP that can be used to access your router, you will then need to map a port on your router (#1) to the device IP on your local network (#2). This is usually referred to as "port forwarding". Most routers will support configuring this. In effect, your tell your router "when you get a message to : pass it to my laptop :"
Your local private IP address will typically have an IP value like 192.168.0.23 (where the 23 can be anything from 1 to 254).
An outside IP will start with something other than 192. Refer to the first link above regarding IP ranges.
You can google "port forwarding" and "public IP" for more info on how IP addresses and port forwarding work, but hopefully this will help get you started. It may seem a bit complicated at first, but if I can understand it, then anyone can :-)

Adding subdomain pointing to same IP but different port

I have a domain name registered at ovh.com, let's say it's called domain.com.
This domain is pointing on my router's public IP, then I redirect the https port 443 of my router to my server port 443. So when we go to domain.com it redirects to my server:443.
To be more accurate, domain.com just redirect to my router's public IP. So for example if I use a graphic database manager, I can tell him that the server address is domain.com:[SGBD port] and It will works.
But all my applications are running on this same server. And to add a little more security, I am not using the usual port for all protocols. So let's say my port are the following :
git : 50000
SGBD : 55000
cloud : 60000
website 65000
and some others, for example some TCP ports between 40000 and 50000.
My git and my cloud have a graphical manager I can access by typing domain.com:50000 or domain.com:60000 in my web browser from everywhere. I use the same URL on all my software. domain.com:50000 for my git client, domain.com:55000 for my database client and so on.
This way is working perfectly but there are 2 problems annoying me :
The first one is that I have to tell the port number to everyone who's susceptible to use my applications. But like I said I am not using usual port number for a little more security so I don't want to share these numbers with everyone.
The second problem is more important :
When I am somewhere, for example at work, it's possible that the firewall is blocking the port numbers I am using. So my personal git isn't accessible, same for my cloud etc.
To solve these problem in one move I wanted to add subdomain on my domain and redirect these subdomain to my differents ports. For example :
website : domain.com:65000
git.domain.com ==> domain.com:50000
SGBD.domain.com ==> domain.com:55000
cloud.domain.com ==> domain.com:60000
So in my mind, with this solution I can type git.domain.com in my browser to initiate the communication by https (the https port is almost never blocked), then redirect it to my router's port 50000 from OVH then my router redirect it to the git port of my server.
But obviously this would be to good to be truth.
When creating a subdomain (at least on OVH ?) we can't specify a port. So I can't set git.domain.com is redirecting to myRouterIp:50000 but just to myRouterIp. So with a web browser, typing git.domain.com will redirect to myRouterIp:443, which is already taken by my website.
So i'm a little confused. Do I have to buy one router with a different public IP per application then making all differents subdomain pointing on a different router ? I almost sure it's a bit ridiculous. How do you think I can solve it ?
As you correctly noticed, in your DNS console you can't specify port; the reason is that DNS does not care about ports, its only purpose is to resolve hostnames to IP addresses.
Another thing important for your problem is that most (non http) application clients will, even if they use friendly hostname, resolve that name to IP address before initiating the connection to your router/server, and then use that IP address for communicating to router/server. That means that when request reaches a port on your router/server, there will be no way for router/server to determine which hostname was initially used.
The rare exception to this is HTTP, where the browser is always sending the requested hostname in Host HTTP header. That means that you can run multiple different websites on one IP address on the same port (that is how shared web hosting works, for example). Setting this up should be pretty straightforward, but is probably out of scope on SO, try SF or SU.
For other (non HTTP services), the only solution is to run them on different ports (which you already do), or to have multiple public IP addresses (which might be difficult to get from your ISP). Also, running non-http services on some random non-default ports (and telling that port number to your users) might be (very sightly) more secure than running them on their respective default ports.
Depending on your use case, one other possible solution would be to have your users connect to your local network using secure VPN, and after that they could have access to your services (which would run on different private IP addresses and any port you like).

Communicating between networks using sockets

I have a question about network connections among computers.
I've made some applications where messages pass through the Internet (via sockets) to make a connection between two devices. However, a strong condition is that two devices must be connected to the same network.
Can anyone give me a trick how to create a communication using sockets between two computers even if they are connected to different netwkorks?
Thank you in advance.
Here is a great tutorial on how to use sockets and general networking
(in java) http://www.thenewboston.org/watch.php?cat=25&number=38
In order to communicate between two diffrent networks over the internet, you will need to do something called port forwarding. What that does is that when your public IP of your network receives a packet with a spesific port number. The router knows where to send that packet to which local IP.
If you dont port forward and receive some data. The router doesent know where to send the packet. Therefore it discards it, which means others wont be able to connect to you.
You will only need to port forward the network with your server (using the example i linked). How you do that is by logging in to your router, and say that a port which the server uses gets forwarded to the IP of the PC hosting the server.
On the other network (client) you will need to change the IP address of which the client shall connect to. That IP address needs to be your public IP of your server's network. You can find that by connecting to the server's network and go to: http://www.whatsmyip.org/ . Keep in mind that public IP addresses may change over time.
Hope this helped!
-Kad

Get Azure public IP address from deployed app

I'm implementing the PASV mode in a FTP server, and I send to the client the IP address and port of the data end point. This is stupid because the IP is actually where the client is already connecting, so there ire two options:
How could I get the public IP
address from a given instance? Not
the VIP, but the public one.
How could I get the original target
IP address that the user used from
a Socket object? Considering routers and load balancers in the middle :P
An answer to any of this questions would do, although there is another way that could work... may I get the public IP address doing a DNS look up of myapp.cloudapp.net?
A fourth option would be use the Azure Management API library... but, too much trouble :P.
Cheers.
Not sure if you ever figured this out, but here's my take on it. The individual role instances are all behind the Windows Azure load balancer and have no idea what the original, outward-facing IP address is. Also, there's no Management API call that returns IP address - Get Deployment returns the URL but not the IP address. I think the only option is going to be a dns lookup.
Having said that: I don't think you can host a passive ftp server in your role instance (at least not elegantly). You may open up to 25 input endpoints on your role (up from 5 - see my recent blog post about this update), but there's manual work involved in the configuration. I don't know if your ftp application lets you limit your port range to such a small number of ports. Also:
You'd have to define each port as its own input endpoint (this is the manual labor part I mentioned) - input endpoints don't allow a port range to be specified, unlike the internal endpoints.
You'd have to specify the port number that's used internally, and the port numbers would need to be sequential
One last thing on ftp: you should be able to host an sftp server with no trouble, since all traffic comes through one port.
The hack that I'm contemplating right now is to retrieve http://www.icanhazip.com/. It isn't elegant and is subject to the availability of that service, but it gets the job done. A better solution would be appreciated!