How to access home network through double NAT

[drjarmin]

Hello, I am using a 5G router (Peplink Max) for my internet connection to my home network.  It's external port IP address is a private address (ie 10.x.x.x) so its using NAT within the cell company's network. 

I would like to be be able to access certain services from my home network externally (for example PLEX, or the ability to access files on my storage).

I have spent a lot of time researching this and the answer I seem to land on is either...

i) as my ISP to allocate an external IP to my router (they have declined)

ii) Set my ISP router in bridge mode. But this doesn't work as its external IP address is not internet facing - its being 'NAT'ed' to use a phrase.

Is there any clever way I could get past this? My router is a Peplink Max and my internal network is managed by a Ubiquiti Dreammachine. Not sure if that advice helps....

Thanks in advance.

[Dieselboy]

If you could start a service on your home machine that maintained a connection to an internet service and then you use that established connection to remotely connect back to your home, then that does work regardless of double-NAT.

Examples of where this works:
1. a service like google chrome remote desktop or similar
2. a remote access VPN

The vpn is a bit more tricky to understand. The home machine makes a connection to a vpn server which gives access to a remote network. Then on the remote side, you can reach the home machine private IP directly and the vpn server takes care of the traffic encryption and routing. Of course, the firewalls and network need to be set up to achieve this.

Neither might be fast enough for what you want to do though. However I use chrome remote desktop quite a bit and audio is fine but video is present but unwatchable.

[drjarmin]

Hi Dieselboy, yes this is exactly what I'm looking to do so I could, for example, stream Plex from my home server when I'm travelling (just one use case but gives an idea).

Something like TeamViewer I guess ?

[Dieselboy]

Teamviewer would let you in but I think the quality of moving video and audio will not be good enough to view your content. You could give it a try.

Have you tried plex remote access? https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289506-remote-access/

You could use teamviewer to enable it and disable it when you dont need it if you're concerned about the access.

[deanwebb]

Interesting to see ISPs now using cell networks for home connections. That means if the above suggestions/discussions don't work out, you'd have to talk to the ISP about possibly a commercial connection to get things working. The other method would be some sort of CASB to connect your home network to a cloud environment and then access via that route.