Possibly the IT manne can help?
I have a controller that I want to connect to but it’s in another town. The controller has a RJ45 plug and when I’m on site I use a lan cable to connect to it from my laptop.
Can this be setup to provide remote access: RUT240 - 4G/LTE Wi-Fi Router | Teltonika Networks
If so what needs to be done to do this?
Alternatively this controller is in a corporate park which has a network. How easy is it to provide a VPN connection??
With the relevant skills… as easy as plonking down a Raspberry Pi and installing OpenVPN or similar on it.
You need to know the IP address of that device on the internet. Most IPS connection will give you a dynamic IP which means the IP will change almost daily. So you need to either have a fixed IP, or you need to set up Dynamic DNS which handles this for you.
For anything that is connected to the internet you should have a Firewall protecting it. This will protect your device that anyone from the outside cannot easily connect to your device inside your network. But this will also make it a bit more difficult when you want to set up a remote connection.
You need to get past these 2 things to be able to connect. In most cases if you use a Wifi router it will do the firewall (which would have a port forwarding option) and have a DDNS option. So make sure your router has these capabilities (or the corporate network can set this for you) and you should be fine.
Here is docs for both on a Asus router
[WAN] How to set up Virtual Server/ Port Forwarding on ASUS Router? | Official Support | ASUS Global.
[Wireless Router] DDNS introduction and set up | Official Support | ASUS Global
And if you want to do VPN server
[VPN] How to set up a VPN server on ASUS router – OpenVPN | Official Support | ASUS Global
It is a fixed IP address which I have 
Unless you’re willing to learn a whole lot in short time, I wouldn’t recommend doing it.
A good alternative is tailscale.com, which will basically provision a VPN for you using off the shelf hardware, including Raspberry Pi or routers.
Otherwise you’re just feeding the botnets.
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Another option, I think MTN will (for a price) do a VPN for you. You could then use an an ordinary LTE router, with a provisioned sim-card and the right APN settings, and it would be like the device is on your local network.
It’s a business service (for connecting remote people to the company network), so don’t expect it to be cheap-cheap.
Is that not perhaps a static IP address on the local network?
It is quite unlikely that you have a static IP address on the internet.
Quite right!
The controller has a fixed IP address.
Then you either need to use a dynamic DNS service or have a server somewhere that your device connects to. For example to create a VPN as was already mentioned.
Its pretty unlikely that you have a static public IP address, you might have a static LAN address?
Might be easier to setup dynamic DNS using something like Duckdns and then doing a port forward on the router there to the device you’re wanting to connecting to, I would imagine you need to access the web interface in which case you’d just port forward to LAN IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and port 80 (http) or 443 (https)
Unless there is authentication on the device, and you know for a fact it has no vulnerabilities, I would not randomly port-forward a device onto the internet. I would still rather advise people to use a VPN. It is much safer.
My 5c , most mobile ISP (so far all of them in SA) does not allow port forward so it is a bit of a challenge to setup a VPN. Depending on the telemetry data that you would like to send alternatives can be.
- Use Zerotier One , like a P2P vpn service
- Use MQTT , there are a couple of free Online Brokers available
Hope it helps
Yeah agree, I kind of just assumed the device had authentication.
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Depends on the account type i.e. end user or business and also some will allow it if you ask, I’m with Vodacom fiber and can port forward to my hearts content.
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