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Forum Discussion
Orbi NAT Hairpinning/Loopback Not Working
I have the Orbi RBR750 router. I set up port forwarding as well as dynamic DNS. Everything works as expected when connecting to servers on my local network using that DNS name and port number when c...
Your comments got me thinking. Thanks for the suggestions. I tested out the things you suggested, but couldn't find an answer.
What port is being forwarded?I tried a few ports and it didn't help.
What DNS service is being used to resolve DNS names?I tried changing this and it didn't help.
I really meant to ask, "which port?" as in 443? 80? what?
The original post mention port(s), i.e. more than one.?
Yes, a bunch of ports including 80. The port number doesn't seem to make any difference.
Frustrating that I have only the RBR50. I forwarded port 80 to my Pi-hole, then opened http://<<my public IP> on two Windows computer a smartphone, and a tablet attached to the Orbi WiFi. All of them immediately brought up the Pi-hole web page.
Now..... how did this happen? Was it
- The request went out to the internet through the ISP and then came back through the ISP to my public IP and was forwarded to the Pi-hole? or....
- The Orbi recognized the public IP and did a NAT loopback?
My guess is the way to determine this is to do a packet capture and compare wan.pcap file against lan.pcap file to see if that traffic ever left the Orbi. I promise to do that tomorrow.
However, attempts to bring up the Pi-hole using the DDNS failed every time with an error that the Pi-hole needed to be whitelisted. I whitelisted the DDNS URL, but the error remained.
I am beyond frustrated. IP works from the local LAN. DDNS does not work from the LAN. (IP worked from a smartphone using LTE data and failed using DDNS. Now, I don't know if this is related to Pi-hole, Orbi.... or what.)
What a dismal situation. Guess I need to set up another service to test in addition to Pi-hole.
I can now confirm that both DDNS and IP works with my Orbi RBR50. Rather than forwarding port 80 to Pi-hole, I forwarded port 80 to my Epson printer, which has a web interface. With a browser on my PC, http://<DDNS> works. http://<public IP> works.
It might be worth a few minutes to confirm that the public IP being used by DDNS is the IP that the Orbi reports on the Advanced Tab, Internet panel for IP Address. This is easy to do. Connect to any of the "what is my IP address?" web sites and compare the IP that they return against the Orbi.
I also like to use a web site to confirm "is this port open?", such as Gibson Research Shield's Up! https://www.grc.com/shieldsup
So far, I am down to two alternatives:
- Port forwarding may be set up on the Orbi, but it is behind another router and does not have the true public IP. This means that NAT loopback cannot work. Or...
- Your Orbi does not work like my Orbi. This is such a basic part of the code that it seems unlikely. but.....???