Goodbye CGNAT! I limped along for over a year with T-Mobile 5G Home Internet for a miserly $30 per month. However my downloads dropped from double-digit mbps to single-digits and I cried uncle. I’m in a T-Mobile fringe area for LTE/5G signal and probably in an area with insufficient capacity for Home Internet. I’ve stepped up to AT&T fiber. As important to me, the change from Commercial Grade NAT to standard NAT means I’ll be able use Dynamic DNS to use my personal domain name to point to my home network. For the uninitiated, your CGNAT IP address changes so frequently that DDNS is useless. This means I can now set up a VPN tunnel into my network for remote control and file sharing. Woohoo!

To use DDNS with NameCheap, go to domain management, Dynamic DNS and create an A + Dynamiic DNS Record with host @ and your IP address, then save. This NameCheap section has the secret password needed for the DDNS client like ddclient for linux.

WireGuard seems to be the go-to VPN server and I installed it on a Proxmox VM using PiVPN. I’m convinced this is the simplest way to setup and manage a VPN. I found excellent WireGuard links on Mike Royal’s github page. Even better is a video from Crosstalk Solutions which adds how to add access to your local network. Next I created a port forwarding entry on my router pointing my WireGuard port to my WireGuard server. Next up is to install the app on my notebook computer to see if it works.

Update 12/30/24

I installed ddclient on my file server and it keeps the ip address lynnhargrove.site up-to-date. I also had a “duh” moment regarding IP reservations on my home network. I ran out of IP reservations on the AT&T router and struggled with servers changing addresses. Pi-hole has a very nice DCHP server that I switched to. I had to edit the dhcp.conf to add a secondary DNS server in case Pi-hole is down. Unfortunately, it reverts to the original dhcp.conf when changes are made to Pi-hole. I originally installed Pi-hole for quicker DNS resolution, but I hadn’t use it to blacklist any websites. I used Steven Black’s unified list of porn, gambling, fake news and social hosts for my blacklist.