Re: [PLUG] Recommendation for a hosted server service

Hello,

On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 11:03 AM Steven Grunza via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

I've been trying to set up a server for the last few months with no success. The server is working as expected but is not accessible from the 'Net.

Everything works within my network and the server can access services outside of my home network but no traffic ever reaches my server from outside my network, at least none that Wireshark can see.

It looks like Comcast is "protecting" me from outside traffic reaching my server. This is probably not a bad thing for most people but in my case I'm trying to experiment with IoT devices accessing my server over the internet/cellular network.

Which port(s) exactly are you trying to access? It's very common for an ISP to block 25 (mail) and 80 (http) at the very least, sometimes more ports than that. I'm not on Comcast at the moment, but when I was, they didn't block 22 (ssh) or 443 (https) as well as some of the higher ports I randomly tried. So you might have some luck either tunneling your traffic or using non-standard ports. Which may or may not violate the terms of your agreement with them, but odds are they won't care if it's on the scale you're describing.

I have spent several hours on multiple days with Comcast tech support trying to get this sorted out but so far have had no luck.

Does anyone have recommendations for hosting services that are low cost? I'm only working on Proof-of-Concept stuff so the overall data amounts and number of devices is rather low.

The de facto answer on this list is Linode; they have a relatively cheap VPS tier and excellent service, are local, and last I knew several employees were active in PLUG. I've also had good luck with Digital Ocean through one of my clients, again for VPS service.

AWS and Azure both seem to have free levels of service available, but I don't know anything about the restrictions or requirements for that.

Isaac

Steven G.

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