VPN/DDNS set up on multiple NAT environment

[MonkeyB]

Hello,

I have recently moved to a new place where my ISP uses PPPoE as a method of connecting to the internet. Basically I do not have any modem in-between and the connection goes directly into the main router. In my case an Asus 68U. I have to input the ISP provided username and password to connect to the internet.

The issue I am facing is I am unable register for DDNS because of multiple NAT. As I am running Asus Merlin Firmware instead of the stock firmware, I received an option to select connection type as External that would let me create DDNS in a multiple NAT environment. But this comes with an exception that VPN services might not work on such a connection. I have tried adding the port forwarding rule on my router but I guess the port forwarding needs to be done at the ISP end and not mine. I think I have searched multiple forums in the past many days and most forums address this issue by suggesting either port forwarding or calling the ISP. Both ASUS support and services like NO-IP said they do not know how to address this issue.

There are many folks like me looking for a solution, I would be great if anyone has addressed this issue and can share a step by step instruction to deal with it.

Summary: Internet connection with no modem and has username and password. Unable to register for DDNS and use OpenVPN server because of multiple NAT. ASUS, ISP and others cannot help. Creating VPN server on my router is the issue. Please help.

Thank you very much.

 

[ColinTaylor]

As you have surmised yourself this is not something that can be "fixed" on the router. The problem and any potential solution rests entirely with the ISP's setup.

EDIT: Perhaps you need to look at the problem differently. What is it that you actually want to use the VPN for? Maybe you can do that another way that doesn't involve the router's VPN server.

 

[MonkeyB]

Thanks, I would have wasted even more time looking into it.

One of my router (Asus 68U) is currently in India. I wanted to setup a VPN connection to my other router (Asus 86U) in the United States in order to unlock certain content only available in India. Paid VPN subscriptions IP's have been blocked and getting a private IP for these purposes seem's like a waste.

Since both my routers are Asus, is there any other way I can address my issue? Thanks for your time.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I can't think of an obvious solution (hopefully others might).

The only idea I had was to do the tunnel (either VPN or SSH) in the opposite direction, from a client in India to a server in the US. Then setup the appropriate routing rules from the US to India. It's not pretty, and would probably be very unreliable.

It might be worth doing temporarily just to see what kind of throughput you get. I suspect that given the distance, protocol overhead and the limitations of the routers' hardware it might not be usable for your purposes anyway.

 

[GromitD90]

I'm not familiar with PPPoE and its limitations, however I have a similar VPN use case between the UK and the US.

With your current configuration are you able to set up port forwarding on the ASUS routers to direct traffic to specific servers on each LAN? If so have you considered setting up your own private VPN running on servers behind your ASUS routers ?

I use SoftEther as my VPN server. It supports its own DDNS service so might meet your needs. Take a look at softether.org and see if it could work for you.