Reliance JioFiber: Port Forwarding NOT SUPPORTED

The JioFiber router web interface presents option for port forwarding however it does not work in practice.
The page accepts and saves all the configuration changes you do. Yet you won't be able to connect to the port from outside.

The router also has a DMZ and UPnP options and those do not work either.
Customer care is unable to help ("We have no information about this at the moment")

The IP address as seen from outside is different than what the router shows as its WAN IP. So the router is not directly exposed to the internet. It is behind a NAT/Firewall.

The IP the router sees is 100.XX.XX.XX
IP as seen by sites like whatismyip.com is 49.XX.XX.XX

As far as I know 100.XX.XX.XX is a public IP but trying to access that IP from outside does not work either. So the router is sitting behind a firewall.

This is a major limitation if you want to run any kind of server. So developers and gamers beware.
If you want to make your DVR internet accessible, you can't.

With JioFi (dongle) you could use internet accessible IPv6 address to eliminate need of port forwarding but the Jio Fiber router only allocates local IPv6 addresses. Even if IPv6 worked like JioFi, it would not solve problem for IPv4 connections. So there is no alternative at the moment. You can use a VPN, but it slows you down and has other limitations.

I was planning to discontinue my old ISP but due to this limitation, I might have to discontinue JioFiber instead.

 

[f03nix]

I saw a lot of discussion on IPv4 ports and made an account to just add this. I got my ports open on my Jio Fiber connection a while back by pretending I wanted it for CCTV (actually the customer care representative nudged me towards saying I wanted it for CCTV since by policy he couldn't give one otherwise). Rest of my experience was pretty much as described earlier in the thread - I'm still under a NAT but jio is routing connections initiated externally to some ip 49.xx.xx.xx:15xxx back to my router. So outbound requests are routed through a different external IP from inbound ones.

What I wanted to add was on the said limitation of 3 ports, and recommendations of external service to overcome this. You don't need any of it, if you have even 1 port externally reachable - you can create a ssh tunnel and map N number of ports from outside the network. It's also much much safer to do so (esp. if you use a rsa certificate). This requires 0 setup if you use mac / linux since they already have ssh daemon running, just a single command to get it done.

 

[devangpatel]

@f03nix can you explain more on How to map N numbers of port from 1 external reachable port.

 

[f03nix]

Sure, the prerequisite is that you have 1 open ext port and pointing to ssh port (22) on a linux/mac machine inside the network. It'll look something like this externally 49.44.44.44:15001 and you should be able to remote login into your machine via 'ssh [email protected] -p 15001'.

Now, on any machine outside the network you can simply call 'ssh -N -L 8081:localhost:80 -L 8080:localhost:8080 [email protected] -p 15001'. You can chain as many of -L local_port:bind_address:remote_port as you want, and all connections to bind_address:local_port will the forwarded to your ssh machine at the remote_port.

There are other types of ssh tunnels, but this is what I personally use to connect to our office server. Using this I can access jenkins, remote desktop, ftp on a single accessible port.

 

[ps29]

The problem with this is that you need a server running 24x7 in addition to the devices you want to reach.

 

[jayesh]

Not exactly a tall order with a raspberry pi

 

[ps29]

so you think raspberry pi can host anything without a server? let alone pi, even if you have to host something on arduino mini, it will require to create a server with the help of an ethernet shield. The point is, there is another device which has to be up and running always.

 

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[royalroy]

I am running a VPN server on my rpi zero. I don't need to keep any other device running, except for the usual router and ONU. I guess that's the same with webserver a too.

 

[ps29]

well I do not have an rpi so I do not think that is relevant.. I'm just trying to access a few iot devices, the ftp on the jio ONT and the jio centrum ONT config page remotely if possible... I live in 2 cities, 4 to 6 months each so I need to access the other place remotely.. running additional servers for this long is not possible.. I'm not able to remotely connect using ipv6 and the iot devices do not support any additional applications to be hosted.. also I'll probably not need remote access to jio centrum gateway if there any other way to remotely restart the jio fiber ONT device(jio did some backend updates which caused the internet to stop working and restarting was the only solution to get the internet back while I was away )..
I do not wish to divert from the topic so just want to understand if someone is able to remotely access any of these 3 things (event with ipv6 if possible) without the need of any additional server hosting 3rd party applications..

 

[RuSo123]

@lucifer @keithcardozo
Great information on IPv6 on Jio, Thanks. I was able to disable the firewall but does not help with NAT issue on the Xbox (even though the Xbox uses IPv6)
IPv6 does not use NAT or require any port forwarding but still doesn't work. How did you manage to get NAT open on your Xbox?

 

[keithcardozo]

@RuSo123
I tested this with the Xbox One X specifially and it gives an open NAT only with IPv6 , disabling IpV6 and using Ipv4 only does not give me Open NAT.
You should not be disabling the Ipv6 firewall , rather allow incoming inbound traffic to always allow(later you can decide on which destination to allow this but to ensure this works the source and destination should be set to any). Screen shots have been attached in previous post and how to test this

@ps29
I access my IOTs like the raspberry PI , arduino's , ESP32 etc remotely.
1. If you need port forwarding refer to by article - you can only port forward unto 3 ports with jio fibre ofcourse the approach to get it done is a pain but i have it setup and working fine.
2. If you have more than 3 IOTs like me , then I invested in an Edgerouter X ( Around 6k INR on Amazon)- This gives me the ability to install Zerotier (its a debian app free to use unto 50 devices). If anyone is interested in how to configure this let me know.
3. With Zerotier installed on the EdgeRouter X, I can then access my entire Lan from outside (remote) both the Jio subnet and the subnet created by EdgeRouter X and can connect to my internal private network by downloading the ZeroTier app for IOS / android or Mac / Windows machine.
4. This approach to me is the most safest as its encrypted.
5. The Ipv6 approach is also great but only few IOTs like raspberry pi support ipv6. For the lower powered Arduino's , ESPs the IPv6 stack is not yet supported or is still experimental - I need to test this yet.

I prefer using ZeroTier for now as it just works - IPv6 when all IOTs support this will be great in the future.