I’ve made an effort to try and “beat” a CGNAT situation for my home internet after finally getting an option that isn’t horrifically slow DSL. My goal is to leverage all this new found bandwidth for sharing my Plex server.
There are all sorts of guides out there for doing reverse proxy and virtual servers etc that all sounded kind of obnoxious. I really wanted to tackle this with a single solution, and getting a VPN that does both Port Forwarding and Dedicated IP seemed like the best answer. So here we are with PureVPN:
- Using Dedicated IP apparently requires connecting to a very specific PureVPN server.
- Using Port Mapping requires connecting to that same server needed for Dedicated IP.
- Connecting to the server for Dedicated IP cannot be done through PP2P, L2TP, or OpenVPN.
- I cannot use my ASUS router’s “VPN Fusion” tool to connect to the server necessary for Dedicate IP. This means I cannot setup device specific VPN connections via my router, which works just fine for NordVPN.
- That last point is especially frustrating because I CAN use that VPN Fusion tool for standard PureVPN servers.
- Connecting to the server for Dedicated IP can ONLY be done by installing the PureVPN app directly on the machine.
- The PureVPN app has basically zero features. No control over only specific apps or machine ports.
- My server running the PureVPN app now locks up when attempting to access it via XRDP/Remote Desktop. Server is Ubuntu Desktop 20.04.
- Connection speeds over this specific server needed for Dedicated IP are ~15down / 32up. That’s FAR short of my ISP speeds.
Does it actually work to solve the issue with Plex remote access? Yeah, it actually does. But holy cow that is a lot of caveats to put up with to get there.