Issue with remote viewing of BI.

[ingeborgdot]

I am 900 miles away from home. For the last 2 weeks I have had no problem viewing my cameras on my laptop, and phone. I went into it today, and it would not work. No matter what I do, it won't allow it.
I went in remotely into my Bl server, and I went into the web server. I hit the remote, external access refresh to make sure all is okay, but something strange is happening.
Let's say my external address is 24.223.123.55:67892. Well, after I hit refesh, it shows the external address as 24.223.123.5567892:67892. What is happening?
I have gone in and restarted BI. I have restarted my router, and switches. I went into the BI server itself and checked the static ip to make sure nothing changed there. Can anyone tell me what is going on?
Thanks.

 

[bp2008]

Let's say my external address is 24.223.123.55:67892. Well, after I hit refesh, it shows the external address as 24.223.123.5567892:67892. What is happening?

That sounds like a bug, you should report it to Blue Iris support. But it is probably not responsible for actual loss of remote access.

With such limited information I can't even guess what is causing you to lose remote access. I assume you are getting into the BI server machine through something cloud-based like teamviewer? (as opposed to a port-forwarded remote desktop connection for example)

If you're short on time and reasonably competent with networking, you might try installing ZeroTier on the Blue Iris machine and on your phone and laptop, and join them all to the same network. Then use the ZeroTier network to access Blue Iris. I posted a brief setup guide for ZeroTier here.

ZeroTier is basically a peer-to-peer VPN which means setup is easy, but in some network environments it might not perform very well without additional effort. For example I always have UPnP disabled in my routers (so that cameras and such can't expose themselves). Unfortunately that cripples ZeroTier's ability to establish fast and reliable peer to peer tunnels so it can be a bit flakey unless you figure out what ports it is using and forward them explicitly in your router. Best not to worry about that until you need it though. The default installation might perform fine for you.

 

[ingeborgdot]

Actually, I remote in with Tailscale to get me remote access.
Well, I think I actually discovered why I can't get into my BI.
I am staying at my Mom's right now, and they have TMobile. I turn off wifi on my phone, and presto, BI work. I switch my laptop to my hotspot from my phone, and presto, BI on my laptop now works.
I guess if you have no other choice, TMobile is a good option, but it sure is a terrible source for working with things like BI. My brother in law has TMobile, and it sure causes me problems too.
I wonder why it worked for 2 weeks with no problems, but just today, it quit working?
As for the refresh and the wan address issue, I have no idea what is going on there.
As for zerotier, I am familiar with it, and actually do use it to run my Brother in Laws BI since he has TMobile and there is no other way to get remote access with that crap.
I mainly use Tailscale, but I am at my limit of 20 addresses right now, and don't feel like paying, so I may just install zerotier on the BI server to fix the issue when on the road. The only issue I have with zerotier on my phone is that it keeps shutting off. I have to go in and turn it back on every so often. Not hard, but I don't like that part of it.

 

[bp2008]

Probably an issue with T-Mobile's carrier-grade NAT for IPv4 then?

Do you have IPv6 access at your house? There's a bit of a learning curve if you've never worked with it before, but you could assign your BI machine a static IPv6 address from the allocation provided by your ISP, and make sure your router's firewall will allow the BI web server traffic. Then you can connect to the IPv6 address in a browser. Just enclose the address in square brackets like this when putting it into the address bar: [2620:119:35::35]

If you use DDNS, some DDNS providers also support IPv6 (they create an A record for IPv4, and an AAAA record for IPv6). If you have IPv4 and IPv6 both setup for the same domain name, then your client device will choose which one to use and you don't really get any say in the matter.

 

[ingeborgdot]

What benefit would IPv6 give over using ZeroTtier or TailScale? I already tried using Tailscale, and it works. I just have not installed ZT yet.