Network timeout

[markebailey]

Yesterday I was successfully connected via the internet to my meteohub administration interface. I was at my home in Torrey, Utah where the meteohub is located and logged on via my pc browser addressed to torreyhouse.dyndns.tv. My goal is to track inside and outside temperature at the house in Torrey from a remote location. Today I am in Salt Lake City and without having changed anything but my physical location get a network timeout message with "The server at torreyhouse.dyndns.tv is taking too long to respond" when I try to access that address. The meteohub in Torrey is still transmitting data to Weather Underground. I am not a programmer and it took considerable effort to get to the place I was yesterday. Any ideas what is wrong?:S

[P3R]

Your first problem is that torreyhouse.dyndns.tv right now points to a private ip address (10.0.0.6). Such adresses are only reachable within a private network, never over the internet. Instead you need to have torreyhouse.dyndns.tv (or rather another name as I'll explain in the end of this post) point at the public ip address assigned to the outside of your router by your internet provider in Torrey.

You must also already have port forwarding enabled in the Torrey router. If that's not enabled you won't be able to reach it from the outside.

When inside your network in Torrey you should use the address 10.0.0.6 to get to the Meteohub (there are other possibilities as well but that's the easiest at this point).

I'm assuming here that you have a common network setup and this is the best I can do without knowing more about your network. If you need anyone to help you with setting this up you need to explain more about your network.

If you do choose to describe your network, please remember never to reveal your exact public ip addresses or domain names on a public forum like this. That is a major security issue. Actually for the very same reason I would advice you to use a different name than torreyhouse.dyndns.tv when you set this up. From a security standpoint I'd consider that name unsafe to use in the future. Everyone now knows your intention with it and when you have it set up correctly your Meteohub will be a target for not so nice people to break in to.

Don't give up now, your halfway there :)

[markebailey]

Thank you P3R.

I presume I make your suggested changes at dyndns.org. How do I find out what the public ip address assigned to my router by my internet provider is?

My setup in Torrey, I imagine, is common. I have a Linksys WRG54T wireless router which is cabled to the meteohub and to a DSL modem. Port forwarding is enabled in the WRG54T. -Mark

[P3R]

It was a long shoot but if you don't know the public ip address or can think of any way to find it out I guess you have to travel there once more to solve this. I'm sorry.

I would try and follow something like this:
1. Make sure that you have a long and hard to guess password for web access on the Meteohub.
2. At dyndns.org enable a new (secret) domain name that you will use for the purpose of reaching the Torrey house in the future.
3. Configure the dyndns-function in the router (not the Meteohub) with the domain name you choose in #2 above.
4. Verify in the router that you port forward TCP port 80 (but no other ports) to the Meteohub ip address (10.0.0.6 if nothing else have changed).
5. At this point the Meteohub web interface should be reachable from the internet by typing the domain name you choose in #2 in the address field of the browser. Unfortunately there's no easy way to test this when inside the network. If you don't have any possibility to test it from the internet when still being reasonable close to the site perhaps someone you trust could try it from someplace else? You really don't have to reveal the user name and password, as long as they get the login prompt from your site it should be ok.

Good luck!

[markebailey]

Thank you P3R for your helpful responses. I will do all you recommend. I will call the ISP tomorrow to see if they can tell me the public ip address of my router. This all makes me think of nearly 100 years ago when one had to be a mechanic in order to drive a car. I just want to see the temperature in the Torrey house! Thanks again for your kind help.

[d_l]

The reason you can't properly access your meteohub from the internet while your computer is on your LAN is that most routers will loop back the packets for the metoehob rather than allow them out on the internet. On some routers, loop back can be disabled, but the most reliable way to test the access to the meteohub is from a computer NOT on your LAN.

If you have also dial-up access with your DSL service for emergencies/outages, this would be a good way to test your meteohub access while on site.

[markebailey]

How interesting. I had no idea of the potential of loop back and so no idea that I wasn't testing for internet access of the router and hub. It's Dungeons and Dragons.

[d_l]

Try pinging your web address sometime from your network. If loop back is working, you will have incredibly low latency (maybe 1-2 ms). So I guess a ping test is a good way to test for loop back.

[P3R]

You either have to learn how to drive the car or get somebody to drive it for you before you can expect it to take you places ...
;)

[markebailey]

And learn how to gap the points, align the front end, and replace the timing chain . . . !

[P3R]

The reason you can't properly access your meteohub from the internet while your computer is on your LAN is that most routers will loop back the packets ...

In my experience most home routers won't do that but normally it doesn't work as a test anyway since dropping such traffic (with the same source and destination address) is among the most basic security filtering any sane ISP should do.

[P3R]

How interesting. I had no idea of the potential of loop back and so no idea that I wasn't testing for internet access of the router and hub.

I'm sorry if I'm confusing you here but I think it will be even more complicated for you to understand if you make incorrect assumptions.

You weren't experiencing a router loop back.

Your Linksys router consists of two parts. It's both a switch that handles LAN traffic within your private network and a router acting on traffic to or from the internet.

Since you had the internal Meteohub address registered with dyndns the traffic was just normal traffic within your LAN. It never even reached the router part of your Linksys router so it never had a chance to loop it back.

[HeinrichH]

To find out your public IP just go to this http://www.whatsmyip.org/ site and you know your IP.
With a good configured DynDNS account there should be no problem to use Meteohub on a remote location.
My station is in Portugal and I'm living in the Netherlands.

[P3R]

To find out your public IP just go to this http://www.whatsmyip.org/ site and you know your IP.

Yes, that's one way. Unfortunately for markebailey that only works when being at the location.

[markebailey]

Thank you for the tutorial gents. Not that I understand yet but I have a sense of what happened and what is wrong and thanks to http://www.whatsmyip.org/ I have a sense of what a public ip address looks like. I don't know enough to ask the question right, but I'm hoping, and doubting, that my ISP can tell me the ip address in Torrey without my being there.

Once I get the Torrey public ip address what will I do with it? If I put that address in my Salt Lake browser will it direct me to the Torrey Router? Trying that out here in Salt Lake does not take me to my Salt Lake router, it just times out.