The next guide in our Auto Port Forward PIA VPN guide is for. We have already covered Transmission, but if you client of choice is the excellent Deluge client, then you will find all the required information here. A very nice features that (PIA) provides is Port Forwarding on their. If you are using a private tracker and you need to have decent upload to maintain your ratio, or if your want to download torrents with low number of seeds available, you will certainly benefit from using an active (open) port in your BitTorrent client.
Port forward configurations performed on the Actiontec are working well. I installed an L2TP/IPSec VPN server, tested internally and it connected successfully. So for all intents & purposes, this validates that the VPN server is correctly configured to accept inbound connections and functioning correctly. If you lucky enough to have a UPnP enabled router or a NAT-PMP enabled router (Apple), Firewalla VPN should just work. In case it doesn't work, you will need to do a manual port forwarding. Basically, you need to map your router's pubic UDP port 1194 to Firewalla box port 1194.
![Port Port](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125499613/782667921.png)
I recently got 3 EEROs and as I was trying to work them into my home network topology, I realized I wouldn't be able to use them fully because the port forwarding feature wasn't working as I needed. A little background: I have a Synology Disk station which runs a VPN server. It enables me to access my home network while I am not at home.
![Forwarding Forwarding](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125499613/688484295.png)
In order to be able to reach it from outside of my home network (which is really, the only time I need to access it). I have to setup port forwarding on my modem and router.
I had previously been using an older VPN protocol, but had to change it as I usually access it from my iPhone, which stopped supporting that protocol. The new protocol I had to setup is L2TP. The port forwarding is on multiple ports, but apparently because this port forwarding is specifically for VPN, routers often have additional 'built-in' capabilities to support VPN. I am not sure what exactly these are. I do know that when I tried to setup my EERO to perform the port forwarding, I was not able to connect to my VPN server when outside of my network. So, to get around this, I have used my EEROs in bridge mode, and have my older router performing DHCP and port forwarding. This is now working but I essentially have an additional piece of hardware in my network just to perform those functions.
Where as, if the EERO was able to support port forwarding for VPN, it wouldn't be necessary. I realize it's a bit of an ambiguous request, because port forwarding is supported on the EERO. So the feature request is: support port forwarding for all VPN protocols, especially the ones supported by iOS devices. A few days ago I got a message indicating this request is under review.
Just wanted make everyone in the community, and Eero product managers aware of the following: I received confirmation from Eero support that this is already supported. Chris in support said the following in his support email to me: Thanks for writing in!
We shouldn't have an issue with ESP as it's a part of the IPsec protocol suite - we pass this traffic on its way between the VPN server and client. So long as you have the proper port forwarding setup on the eero that you need to access the VPN server (I'm assuming this is another device you have on the network), then you should be good to go.
I hope this helps and let me know if you have any other questions! Best, Christopher @ eero -end of message- I have yet to try it out, but I did a preliminary test and I think it is working. I will post again once I have had a chance to confirm everything is working as expected. Improvisit I assume you setup your eero in Network Settings/Advanced Settings/Reservations & Port Forwarding. Add a reservation for your Mac and opened the VPN ports?
In that configuration I have separate entries for each of the UDP ports and TCP port. My dynamic DNS hostname is hosted by and my Internet IP address for the DNS is the IP Address in eero's Network Settings/Advanced Settings/Internet Connection. The key is to have your DNS IP address at the host site set to your IP address the eero system uses to feed Internet activity. I finally got mine to work. These are the steps I did: in the Eero app: -make sure your disk station has a reservation/IP -remove ports 500, 4500 and 1701 from any other devices -add port forwarding rules for all 3 ports to your disk station reservation in eero On your disk station: -make sure you've setup the L2TP VPN configuration correctly.enable and save the config Reboot the Eero and restart the VPN Server Service: -On the disk station, go to packages, STOPm, then START THE VPN SERVER SERVICE -Restart your whole eero network. First try to VPN into your Diskstation WHILE on the Eero wireless network. That should work. If it does, then disconnect the VPN, Reboot your Eero again, disconnect wifi on your mobile device, and try over your cellular connection once everything is up.
There were 2 reasons this worked for me. First the Eero (because it's UDP) Holds the port forwarding session open for a period of time. Rebooting the Eero will force it to clear any open connections.
(especially if your reservation or port forwarding rules were incorrect and needed to be corrected. IE you were debugging the situation) The VPN Server on the disk station was also blocking the connection for some reason. A restart fixed that issue. The auto-block feature may also be causing this.
Prior to Eero, I had issues with what appeared to be the Verison router not forwarding rules all the time. It may actually be something with the Disk Station VPN Server that's not quite right. I'll be switching to a Raspberry Pi as a VPN gateway (with proxy arp for even better support) if this continues. But I can say, Eero does support L2TP VPN with the latest firmware.
Imahawki pretty sure that site only checks TCP. You need UDP working. If you have a Mac or Linux box on your network for testing, forward those rules to a test host. Reboot the Eero. Then use a tool like netcat to establish a UDP session.
On the internal host: nc -lu 500 On the external host: nc -uvv external IP 500 Repeat for ports 4500 and 1701. Run wireshark on the internal host for more insight listening on those 3 ports and you should see the packets come in when you attempt to connect.
If cox is not blocking, and Eero is forwarding, then anything you type on the remote end should show up on the local side. (You can try TCP as well, just drop the u flag on both sides). Test for each of the 3 ports.
As a bonus, while running “nc -ul 500” on the test host, initiate a VPN session from your VPN client on an external network, and see if you get garbage from netcat when the session starts. If so, that tells you Eero and Cox are doing everything right. If all that checks out, then it’s your Diskstation where the trouble lies. Otherwise, something is blocking your traffic. Either the remote provider, your local provider, or something in between. Remember when you redo the forwarding rules on the Eero back to the Diskstation, reboot the Eero each time.
I have the same problem. I have VPN setup on my Synology NAS, and it works just fine from within my LAN, so I know it is set up correctly. I've forwarded all the UDP ports I'm supposed to, but it doesn't work from outside the LAN. I've successfully forwarded ports for other services, so I can only conclude the eero is screwing up something. These are CLEARLY not designed for anybody but naive users who don't want to do anything remotely sophisticated.
Regretting my decision to buy so many eeros.