Mobile Broadband and DDNS

[grolschuk]

Hi all,

I've just been asked a question and cannot find any recent answers on the board, so thought I better check with those in the know or use the service.

We are wanting to put a VF MBB SIM into a SIM enabled router, and use the routers DDNS (DynDNS) client to allow us to connect to services behind the router.

Assuming the router setup is fine and working, are mobile broadband connection IPs publicly visible for DDNS to work?

If not, is there a way to get a static and visible IP assigned?

Does the MBB tariff need to be a certain flavour in either instance?

Hope that makes sense.

Ta

[Retired-Dave]

Hi grolschuk

I'll be honest, I don't think you'd find any answers for this on the eForum, let alone recent ones!

I'll have to check on this. As soon as I have any information I'll let you know.

Dave

[Retired-Wayne]

Hi Grolschuk,

When using our public APNs (internet, smart, wap.vodafone.co.uk etc) the IP and DNS are dynamically assigned from within the network. The public facing IPs are NAT'd and PAT'd as well.

The IP assigned is potentially different every time you connect. Even if you leave the connection online, a refresh is generated every 12 hours, which means you'd potentially get a new IP address every 12 hours.

We'd recommend purchasing a private APN. If you did want to look into this, then your Vodafone account manager would be the best port of call.

I hope that helps.

Thanks

Wayne

[grolschuk]

Cheers Wayne,

Will get in touch with them.

The DDNS service on the router would get around the constantly changing IP as it reports the current WAN Port address back to a central service, which then assigns it to a DNS name and keeps it up to date... so we would access the box by mbb.somedomain.com and ddns will make sure that always points at the router.

It is just if the inbound traffic would be able to get through the VF network or be blocked somewhere in the NAT/PAT maze.

[Neil_Brown]

Dyndns might attach the right WAN IP address to your DNS record — although I am not sure it would, here, actually — but the network NAT/PAT would prevent the traffic from reaching your endpoint.

Could you use a reverse SSH tunnel from without your network, back out to the remote machine(s)?

[islandgirluk]

 Hi

I was also looking for information about this for my Vodafone 4G connection - and found this page which explains about 4G connections not giving a Public IP address which means that DYNDNS will not work

http://www.3grouterstore.co.uk/3G/Fixed_IP_SIM.html

I had to switch to a different network using 3G only to get around this problem - hopefully Vodafone will sort this out to offer to customers like us that can only use 3G/4G becuase wired connections are unavailable