Access to dashboard outside my local network

[Toshi Bass]

I am looking for some advice re the best way to access my dashboard etc from outside of my local network.

Currently I have a vpn setup on my router but was wondering if there's a better way perhaps using some free cloud service

Looking at weaved (remot3.it) anyone here using that ?

Any other solution I should consider ?

And what advice on security ?

Help / advice to take this next crucial step would be appreciated

[Colin Law]

I use a VPN, then you have no worries about security.

Colin

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[Sharon Viente]

Hi,

There are several services where you can host your node red flows like fred.sensetecnic.com and IBM bluemix, or you can provision node red on any cloud provider as it's a Node.JS applicaiton.

Otherwise, locally it's standard routing where you will need to set a route from your public IP to your local machine (note that it's port 1880 locally).

[ghe...@me.com]

Weaved is good for one time access to fix something or adjust something but as it gives new

login details for each login I don't think would be suitable for this application yet

Im sure this will come as they have a great idea.

[Julian Knight]

I can see that it makes setup easier but is it really different to a VPN? Maybe I missed something. VPN's are great but they can be a pain when trying to combine with a corporate network for example.

If all you need is access to a web page or two, you could also set up a reverse proxy and only accept incoming connections from that. It is pretty easy to set up and once done is very easy to adjust if needed. Anything that will run NGINX for example would do or HAProxy if preferred. One of the advantages of NGINX is that you can also use Phusion Passenger to front your web app which makes it more efficient and will auto-restart on error. A reverse proxy can even do a user login front-end for you too, refusing to pass any traffic to your back end unless the user is authenticated. Apache web server will also work but tends to be a lot more resource hungry which limits throughput on restricted devices such as a NAS, Pi or a VPS. You might also want to use the free version of Cloudflare which will filter out some additional attacks from the web & can even be used to provide a free trusted https service leaving you only needing a self-signed cert to manage traffic from your server to the Cloudflare servers.

You can also use a NAS such as the Synology range which can easily be set up for a reverse proxy.

[Toshi Bass]

Thanks for responses they give a bunch of ideas to mull over.

[Toshi Bass]

After a bunch of "mulling" and the fact that ios has removed PPTP VPN access, so my router vpn setup no longer works, I approached weaved/remot3.it to see if they could resolve access issues to node-red.

I am happy to report that weaved/remot3.it  secure connection  now fully works with node-red allowing access to :1880 and to :1880/ui without issue, the personal plan is free for a 5 minute connection so as I primarily want it to access my dashboard to monitor info or turn something on or off its enough time, when time is up you are able to connect again (its not necessary to log on again just press connect). you can upgrade to a paid service for longer connection times if you need it, but for me 5 minutes is fine I can even access a couple of video feeds I have connected via the dashboard.