Dynamic DNS service

It is a basic security feature that the router itself does not accept connections from the WAN port (the internet).  If it did, then people (and robots) all over the world could continuously bombard the router with connection attempts until they finally either gained access or caused the router to freeze up.

What the router will do is

• Forward connection attempts to specific devices on the internal LAN by forwarding those specific IP port number to that device.  This allows users to host web sites, media servers, security cameras, etc. and access them from the internet.
• Accept OpenVPN connections to the router itself when they present the correct security credentials.

Dynamic DNS (DDNS) provides a method to keep a URL pointed toward the public IP of the router.  Most residential internet accounts have dynamic addresses, where the Internet Service Provider (ISP) can change the address at any time.  Although ISPs do not appear to change customer IPs "all the time", sometimes they do and attempts to connect to the previous IP address will fail.  DDNS solves this problem.

For years, Orbi firmware had a feature called Remote Access which exposed an SSL version of the Orbi web interface to the WAN port.  With this connection available, people (and robots) would very quickly identify the open port and begin trying to exploit it.  The user name is always "admin", so no effort is required to learn that.  If the password is not difficult, it might be guessed in a matter of hours (days, weeks.  robots can work forever).  I was annoyed to see Remote Access go away because my password was estimated to take 4 billion years to guess. (very long and complicated)

But.... Remote Access is gone.  The only way to access the Orbi web interface from the internet is to enable OpenVPN.

This does require setting up DDNS as the first step, so you are half way there!