We have found that whilst running the TTN forwarder on a Virgin Media (Large UK ISP) internet connection, we are unable to contact the discovery server on port 1900.
The forwarder fails with:
grpc: addrConn.resetTransport failed to create client transport: connection error: desc = “transport: context deadline exceeded”; Reconnecting to {discover.thethingsnetwork.org:1900
After some digging we found that Virgin Media issued a security warning on port 1900, here and even though my VM SuperHub is in modem mode, that this port may be closed by their gear.
Sure enough activating a VPN allowed the forwarder to contact the discovery server.
Can you setup a mirror for 1900 at another port so that Gateways behing VirginMedia gear can connect?
We’ve received such requests since we started TTN, but we have decided not to do this. We believe in an open Internet without restrictions. There are indeed some ISPs and enterprise networks that restrict Internet the access of their users, but TTN doesn’t see it as our job to circumvent those restrictions. Instead, we encourage community members that face such restrictions to contact their ISPs or enterprise network admins and convince them of the importance of an open and unrestricted Internet.
With our upcoming v3 backend we do our best to reduce the number of different ports we use, and we’ll even try to support multiplexing different protocols over the same ports (80/443), but only if that has no negative impact on our “normal” users.
I experienced the same issues with Virgin Media as well.
The only thing is that it only seems to affect The Things Network Packet Forwarder which is at https://github.com/thethingsnetwork/packet_forwarder , However as this is now on a halt of development I moved over to the mp_pkt_fwd forwarder which worked no issues with virgin media.
However @htdvisser UK ISPs are terrible and I even had an hour long phone call asking them to lift the port block, just to get a letter through the post saying that the port was open on my router and to disable it due to the possible security issue. There’s also many bigger issues with UK ISPS that they won’t resolve so unblocking a port is virtually impossible.
@BWhitten it can work if you use a VPN to get around it, or if you use the mp_pkt_fwd forwarder or the classic semtech.
Hummm, …good to get a heads up on this as about to deploy 6-8 more GW’s around UK over next 2-4 weeks, having tested/commissioned/soak-tested them on BT xDSL & VDFN 3/4G Mob over last 1-2 months I know at least 3 sites - poss 4 - are likely VM back-haul.
Good catch on the varied treatment of PF’s @Ryanteck Will keep TNPF based unit on BT and make sure I deploy Classic systems on the VM Links…
…If enough TTN users complain - vocally - & frequently perhaps they may start to listen - esp as many use cases are Biz oriented and they may not like loosing commercial vs consumer traffic…
…how about a TTN ‘Free the Port 1900 victims!’ VM petition?! any takers?
We’ve recently moved back to Sky so I can try it with them to see. However I’m primarily using mp_pkt_fwd now, however not sure if the official TTN gateway does it.
It took around 3 months of complaining to get VM to replace a bit of hardware in one of the cabinets nearby to get our full 100Mbits instead of 10Mbits.
Not sure if it’s possible for us to setup a server to act as the same page?
I was going to ask on the slack but thought it was better here. @htdvisser I was wondering what the plans are with V3 and the discovery server as with it being blocked by Virgin Media is quite a big issue.
In the UK they have approximately 20% of the market share (With the other two major providers having around 24% & 37%) however are a very popular option specifically Businesses as they are the network that provides most with fastest speeds compared to the other two companies (They have their own coaxial network rather than all the others relying on older ASDL Systems).
With the digital catapult announcement and wanting to build a bigger things network in the UK this would be quite a crucial component on relying on that success and could cause issues when migrating to V3 in the UK.
It might be worth if you log IP addresses on the EU Router / Bridge to do an analysis of the IPs to get a statistic of the % of gateways connecting using virgin media (They’re a pretty easy to spot IP Range). Or when V3 is ready for testing if affected we might be able to complain to VM. However I doubt it.
V3 won’t have a discovery server, so at least that problem will be solved
With v3 we will still need to expose different protocols on different ports, so I’m afraid this will keep being an issue. Hopefully with an organization such as Digital Catapult joining us, it will be easier to make a stronger voice towards operators that restrict access to the Internet.
So far as I’ve been with both Sky & Virgin Media since running TTN Gateways I’ve found no issues with the port the bridges run on and this accounts for approximately 50% of the UKs ISP Marketshare. And suspect that if there was an issue with BT we’d have known by now.
any takers?